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.

I've never laid a cane on the back of a lord before, but if you force me to I shall speedily become used to the practice.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.

How does anybody ever think of anything?

You're constantly changing man. But the film's not changing. The film stays the same. That's the beautiful aspect of it.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.