I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.

This is the birth of the modern human soul. The artists are like us, not like the Neanderthals, who had no culture - and who incidentally were still roaming the landscape at the time the paintings were made. It is striking that there is a distant cultural echo that seems to reach all the way down to us, over dozens of millennia.

I'm very, very curious about how people live under the volcano, how they handle the permanence of danger.

I do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to... it's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

In a way, I managed to get the deepest things, the best things out of people. That's why I'm a filmmaker. If you don't have it in you, you'd better do something else.