Edward Yang

“I was the leader of the Taiwanese new wave. All these guys would just gather in my house, talking and laughing and drinking: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen — just about all of them. You could just push open the door. Everyone just wanted to do similar things. We weren’t allowed to, and no one was willing to give us any money to, but we shared all these idealistic thoughts.”

Terrence Malick

“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Harun Farocki

“Ten years on it’s always the article on the back of the newspaper cutting that’s of interest, but half a column is missing.”

František Vláčil

“I never worked as anyone's assistant director nor did I ever study at any film academy, thus the Army Film Division was my 'trade school'.”

Michael Snow

“If there are ‘narrative cinema’ elements in my films I don’t want them to take you ‘elsewhere’ but to keep you here watching the film, a construct, an artificiality.”

Zhang Lu

Peter Watkins

“I think that the main impact on my work, on the making of this film, came from the intensity of the similarity I felt to Edvard Munch as a man, as an artist, as someone who struggled throughout his life.”

Trinh T. Minh-ha

“Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion. Please follow me. Trust me, for deep feeling and understanding require total committment.”

Nam June Paik

“Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.”

Jean Genet

“To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”

Nicholas Ray

“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”

István Szabó

“I don’t think that you can separate art and politics because politics is life, and if you separate art and politics it means that art has nothing to do with life.”

Serge Gainsbourg

“Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.”

Hans Richter

“Rhythm cannot be explained completely by thought nor can thought be put in terms of rhythm, or converted or reproduced. They both find their connection and identity in common and universal human life, the life principle, from which they spring and upon which they can build further.”

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

“From my films, you can at least learn about Iran, you can get a sense of the history and the society. But no such films have been made about Afghanistan, so you really can't know much about it.”

Salvador Dalí

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

Yuriy Norshteyn

“Never allow oneself to remain the same – like a river, always renew yourself. I’m always wondering about the paths that would open animation to become a real dramatic art.”

Fyodor Khitruk

“When the wind blows straight to my chest, against me, I have plenty of energy. When the wind blows from my back, that energy disappears. During the period of tight censorship, we struggled with all our might to get our voice heard. But now that everything’s allowed, the strive has vanished. It’s like one French writer once said: an artist must always be a little hungry. Right?”

Ken Jacobs

“In real life, there’s no stories. Everything is unending, confusing. Nothing starts and concludes. There’s no beginning, middle and end in the actual experience of our lives, and we want this kind of neat little package, and we make them for ourselves in our stories.”

Martin Scorsese

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.”