Know what it is the emotional statement to convey, and use taste and judgement to help the actors give their best possible performance.

New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema.

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

I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.

A film needs more than you can give it in a lifetime.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

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