“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art”

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”

“The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force - not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self - these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. Mostly it is a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity.”

“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”