If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.

n Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts.