Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don't need to 'read' painting.

I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And I don't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public.

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.

There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist.

I imagine if you had built the Newton Memorial outside Paris ... it would have undoubtedly shown the violence of 1870 and 1914 and 1942 and 1945 - even 1968! Consider building a vast cube of stone merely to register the effects of violence - marked and dated as an indictment.

I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn't want me to create a guy who is mortal.