Nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing.

In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.

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.

The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.

I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.

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.