I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.

Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved-that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.

The most terrifying fact about the universe not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Either you care, or you don't. There's no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

Have you ever had a single moment's thought about my responsibilities?