Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?

How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?

I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there's got to be a captain.

When you're in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.

In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.

In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

In science fiction, we're always searching for new frontiers. We're drawn to the unknown.

That's part of the policy: To keep switching gears.

On rare occasions, Dad used to reminisce about when he met Eisenhower and how Churchill would pop in, in the late hours of the evening or night, carrying a cigar, when he'd obviously had a good dinner.

The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film.

A hit for me is if I enjoy the movie, if I personally enjoy the movie.

The word 'religion' is only a label. What lies behind that, the most important thing of all, is the word 'faith'. You either have faith, or you don't have faith, or you have degrees of faith - and if you have degrees of faith, then you become agnostic. You're kind of in-between, or you're on the fence.

Choosing location is integral to the film: in essence, another character.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

Try writing a book, dude. That's difficult.

I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.

If I have to, I'll go and direct theater and talk till the cows come home.

It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.

Because I was a kid from north of England, the only films I had access to was not alternative cinema, which in those days would be foreign cinema; I would be looking at all the Hollywood movies that arrived at my High Street.

As a filmmaker, deep blacks are essential, and in my experience, no technology captures those attributes as well as Plasma.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at.

I think there's nothing worse than inertia. You can be inert and study your navel, and gradually fall off the chair. I think the key is to keep flying.

Fire is our first form of technology.

I was one of those kids who tended to stay in on Saturday nights. My mother used to come and say, 'Why don't you go to the dance with the boys?' And I'm going, 'No, I'm perfectly happy.' I think my parents thought I was definitely weird.

I was always aware that this whole Earth is on overload.

And anyway, it's only movies. to stop me I think they'll ahve to shoot me in the head.

Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.

Digital is a different world because you are sitting at home and a hi tech piece of equipment today is within reach of most people, so they are watching a pretty hi tech version of whatever you've done.

There's a big film industry in Egypt, and quite a big one in Syria, and there's a big Muslim community in Paris.

I get so used to working with writers that my prime occupation is development.

I like Wadi Rum - it's the best view I've ever seen of what could be Mars.

People have no idea how physically tough doing a film is.

I watched Someone to Watch Over Me the other night. I thought it was a really good movie. It's a great movie.

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.

I used to agonise over what to do next, but now I'm making a movie a year. It's insane, but it's only a movie after all. You just hang in there, and occasionally you might make something which you can call art... briefly.

If you ever have a kid who doesn't know what to do, stick him in art school. It's amazing what evolves.

The people who really resurrected 'Blade Runner' was 'MTV.'

Your landscape in a western is one of the most important characters the film has. The best westerns are about man against his own landscape.

The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.

What you do, is you gradually become more and more experienced, and more and more realistic about dramatic tolerance, i.e. about how long the play should be.

I think Phil Dick was particularly interesting in that, first of all, he was a very modern man and a very modern thinker, but I don't know what demons drove him.

I unfortunately do suffer for my art.

Once, I got slaughtered after 'Blade Runner' by Pauline Kael: three pages of slaughter. I was so offended, I would never read any more press.

When I started the original 'Alien,' Ripley wasn't a woman, it was a guy.

I don't get attached to anything. I'm like a good antique dealer. I'm prepared to sell my most valuable table.

It's hard writing screenplays.

The key thing is you can be the only person, your own critic.

I'll reshoot a corridor 13 different ways, and you'll never recognise them.