In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, ….

I also think that everyone has an elitist approach to his own art, a complex knowledge of it, whether he is a clockmaker or an engineer. And I think ….

On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no….

I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. ...….

There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ab….

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward..

I imagine if you had built the Newton Memorial outside Paris ... it would have undoubtedly shown the violence of 1870 and 1914 and 1942 and 1945 - ev….

I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and jus….

I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does i….

I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet..

I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this….

What do you want art to give you? What do you want cultural experience to give you? Shouldn't it be in-depth, profound experiences which have some sa….

My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Pe….

Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth..

My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby….

I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes..

I do feel for me that cinema has somehow ceased to be a spectator sport. I get tremendous excitement out of making it rather than watching it..

Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't..

A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options..

It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one..

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read..