“Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There’s a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.”

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.

The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.

Personally, I don’t like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she’ll fool her husband, I figure she’ll fool me.

I’ve never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies. Egotism and laziness. And they’re all lit like television shows.

I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live.

A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

I have an unfortunate personality.

King-ian nonviolence is a way of thinking and living and is not confined to the work of social and systemic change.

Whatever lives, lives to die in sorrow. We engage our hearts, and grasp after the things of this world, only to undergo the pang of losing them.

Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Live with your century; but do not be its creature.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Violence – look, we live in a violent world, man. This country was founded on violence. Who’s kidding who?

At the very end, the one person who Rambo should kill, he doesn’t kill. He lets it live. Because you can’t kill that kind of hypocritical bureaucracy. It goes on forever.