The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

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

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.

An American critic wrote that she would rather be forced to read the New York telephone directory three times than watch the film A Zed and Two Noughts, a third of which was a homage to Vermeer. Conceivably, if you are a list-enthusiast like me, the New York telephone directory might be fascinating, demographically, geographically, historically, typographically, cartographically; but I am sure no compliment was intended.