People think in narratives - in beginnings, middles and ends. The danger when you edit something too severely is that it no longer makes sense; worse….

People like nonfiction presented to them in a certain way, so that they don't have to think about whether it's true or not. They like it to have that….

Part of the mystery of any given photograph is the fact that it was taken at a certain time and in a certain place and time keeps moving on. A photog….

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious..

The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it..

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves th….

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing..

Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do.".

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference bet….

Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a ca….

The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't..

People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different th….

You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself..

I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely unco….

My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so..

I think we get into all kinds of difficulty by saying photographs should be taken in a certain way which guarantees their veracity. I think that's a ….

What's interesting is that Citizen Kane was meant as an anti-fascist/anti-capitalist melodrama and for Donald Trump it becomes just another kind of m….

If you told me thirty years ago that people would be parodying documentary films, I never would have believed it. It wasn't clear that the films them….

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable..

There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that's out of control, t….