“When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching that film.”

The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.

Man is a genius when he dreams. Dream what you are capable of. The harder you dream it, the sooner it will come true.

The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something.

Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one.

I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I’ve liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film.

Take me, subtract movies, and you get zero.

They don’t know it, but they’re losing nature. They don’t see that they’re going to perish. The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.

If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.

By doing this I sense instantly when something isn’t right. Watching something does not mean fixing your gaze on it, but being aware of it in a natural way.

I like silent pictures and I always have … I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way.

I simply do not like to show my weakness, and I hate to lose, so I am a person who tries hard. That’s all there is to me.

I’ve been able to work for so long because I think next time, I’ll make something good.

Page 61: No matter where I go in the world, although I can’t speak any foreign language.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people.

In a mad world only the mad are sane.

Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.

The invasion of Iraq, particularly, gave a big shot in the arm to the jihadi extremists.

The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form – the one of the particles, the other of the waves – are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.

When I first prepared this particular talk…

Elicited by a particular set of circumstances on a particular day, and we do well to wait a while before concluding that what we see is the whole person.

It’s hard for me to think of others because I’m not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.