“When you put a camera in front of me, I’m home.”

I really believe that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.

Television can stir emotions, but it doesn’t invite reflection as much as the printed page.

I was not a public – I was not a thinker. I was a doer.

I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.

They’re counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They’re counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket!

Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government.

Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths – half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it – as if the cause depends on you, because it does.

In fact, so much of life, as you know, is serendipitous. That’s why you better be prepared at any time for anything, because it may happen to you.

In tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a “war on terror” – exactly what, pray tell, is that?

Having lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had not struck us.

Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats – the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms – while the field hands are left with the scraps.

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I’ve thought everyone is a teacher.

Barack Obama strikes me as a man of strong principles and weak convictions – the kind of guy who would rather teach constitutional law than practice it, or who’d rather watch the match alone on TV than arm-wrestle his opponents.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.

I’m very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.

It really is a pleasure to work with someone who you admire. Whatever you do in front of the camera, and I don’t know what it is, but actors have this thing that you recognize someone that makes you better. When you do that, it’s a great feeling.

I generally prefer to stay quiet before a performance. I don’t like television cameras, but an interview is OK.

I had no education in filmmaking. I started with a 8mm camera. I made 34 films, and little by little I gained more experience in filming.

I’ve fallen down crevasses, been bitten by snakes, been knocked unconscious, had various limbs broken and once, a heavy camera came plunging down which very nearly decapitated me.

Here’s the beauty of a camera: you don’t have to come up with words for what you’re looking at… Maybe another angle is needed sometimes. When we’re burned out from writing, we can photograph or draw, look at the world in a different way, and photographers could try writing what they see.