All of my films deal with the same thing: striving, socially and culturally, to stay alive.

Retirement? You're talking about death, right?

Most of my films I call arena films. I deal with a confined area -- an arena -- and I try to cover every aspect of it.

Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you're finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there's something in there, but you're not sure exactly what it is until you find it.

You will never see'Altman's Great Film of the Seventies: The Director's Cut' because you have never seen a film of mine that wasn't the director's cut. I have never permitted it.

That wasn't an ending. It was just a stopping point.

I never knew what I wanted, except that it was something I hadn't seen before.