I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.