“I have no idea who the characters are, later, their personalities take over anything I might want to do.”

I believe that it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the filmmaker to make his film in the first place.

If you want to be a great director, be a great screenwriter.

I am not a special person, I am not especially strong; I am not especially gifted.

I believe this is what the medieval Noh playwright and theorist Zeami meant by ‘watching with a detached gaze.’

During the shooting of a scene the director’s eye has to catch even the minutest detail. But this does not mean glaring concentratedly at the set.

Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied… That’s why they can keep on working.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

If I were to write anything at all, it would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies. In other words, take ‘myself,’ subtract ‘movies,’ and the result is ‘zero.’

I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with.

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

My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something.

I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.

To be an artist means to search, to find and look at these realities. To be an artist means to never look away.

A truly good movie is enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it.

To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.

I don’t think anything of Laura Frank. You heard me – Laura Frank. Not Lawrence. Laura… It’s not that I blame him, I just wish he’d go to a manly tactic and just fight me. Don’t whine. When he whines, that’s when I change his name of Lawrence Frank.

Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.

I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

A mistress never is nor can be a friend. While you agree, you are lovers; and when it is over, anything but friends.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.