Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.

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.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.