“Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.”

“Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three ...”

“But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.”

“The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary.... You once told me you were not a natural writermy...”

“It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in Londo...”

“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”

“The dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models -- that we might not need animals in the flesh.”

“Women think in [Douglas] Sirks films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk the...”

“The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second”

“Music is the final piece of filmmakingthe essential element that pulls emotion from an audience and puts the goosebumps on the screen.”

“Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.”

“The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.”