The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.

I do feel for me that cinema has somehow ceased to be a spectator sport. I get tremendous excitement out of making it rather than watching it.

We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?

I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.

Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary.