“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.

All creation is in the art of seeing.

Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.

. You have to make sure you don’t hurt or hit someone. And hit the beats, because they have five cameras

I will never lose anything that an audience will miss

I turned things that were scripted as effects into in-camera stuff, which is sexier.

I thought it would be sexier if it were in-camera cuts. So I did that.

We’re so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don’t realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet…

All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera.

I am semi-ambivalent about being on camera – sort of low-key. I don’t like being on camera stuff that much.

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.