"If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe."

"Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."

"Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?"

"Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind."

"Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?"

"The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...]"

"You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates."

"For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory."

"I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard."

"There is never an excuse not to finish a film."