The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.

Some people demand a five-line capsule summary. Something you'd read in a magazine. They want you to say, 'This is the story of the duality of man and the duplicity of governments.' I hear people try to do it -- give the five-line summary -- but if a film has any substance or subtlety, whatever you say is never complete, it's usually wrong, and it's necessarily simplistic: truth is too multifaceted to be contained in a five-line summary. If the work is good, what you say about it is usually irrelevant.

From the very beginning, all of my films have divided the critics. Some have thought them wonderful, and others have found very little good to say. But subsequent critical opinion has always resulted in a very remarkable shift to the favorable. In one instance, the same critic who originally rapped the film has several years later put it on an all-time best list. But of course, the lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.

It's impossible to tell you what I'm going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.