In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.

Most of my videos consist of fragments, one or two minutes long. They are haikus or sketches. I have thousands.

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."

Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.

I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.