A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

[Making movies] you're not trying to capture reality, you're trying to capture a photograph of reality.

Regret isn't going to get me anywhere. It's like being obsessed with something. It doesn't bring you anywhere.

No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be.

I'm happy - at times - making films. I'm certainly unhappy not making films.