Ermanno Olmi

“...our wars of machines and technology make 'progress' ever more impersonal and deadly - a 'progress' that has not guaranteed man's human, moral, and civil growth.”

Tom DiCillo

“Look at the movies people are watching. They're about nothing. You invest nothing. People can't invest real emotion because it's too terrifying.”

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

“In my films the landscapes connect the characters to a sense of something cosmic. I try to recapture those moments in life where you suddenly feel that connection to a wider universe.”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

Luis Buñuel

“If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'”

Mira Nair

“I want to question what the outside is and who defines it. I often find those that are considered to be on the outside, extremely inspiring.”

Abbas Kiarostami

“But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.”

Peter Greenaway

“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”

Federico Fellini

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one...”

Orson Welles

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

David Lynch

“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”

Kim Ki-duk

“I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.”

Guru Dutt

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Satyajit Ray

“What is attempted in these films is of course a synthesis. But it can be seen by someone who has his feet in both cultures. Someone who will bring to bear on the films involvement and detachment in equal measure.”