“I don’t like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don’t really understand the word ‘irony’ too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it’s much more exalted.”

I just like going into strange worlds.

Be true to yourself. Don’t take no for an answer. And start your Transcendental Meditation.

I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business – everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs.

All my movies are about strange worlds that you can’t go into unless you build them and film them. That’s what’s so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.

I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we’re all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist.

A filmmaker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don’t have to die to shoot a death scene.

What do you fear, most of all? The possibility that love may not be enough.

Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual.

The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.

Secrets and mysteries provide a beautiful corridor where you can float out. The corridor expands and many, many wonderful things can happen, I love the process of going into mystery.

The big treasury is an ocean of infinite creativity. It’s a creativity that creates everything that is a thing – it’s mighty powerful creativity.

Inside, we are ageless and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless center.

New mysteries. New day. Fresh doughnuts.

When you have something that brings a real emotion, that’s the power of cinema.

We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.

What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficent for anything else but domestic concerns!

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.