The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

• Being a father at a later age is different from when I had my other two daughters when I was in my 20s and 30s. If you're in your 60s and you're with the kid every day, you're dealing with the mind of a child, so it opens up that childishness in you again.
• I don't like being in houses alone.
• Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.
• Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.
• It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.
• As you grow older, you change.
• Death comes in a flash, and that's the truth of it, the person's gone in less than 24 frames of film.
• Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.
• Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other, but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.
• Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'