“Film contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of.”

“Dreamt I had a meeting with the Austrian Film Institute about a grant. They told me I would never get one, but I should try insurance fraud.”

“Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted…”

“Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.”

“Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.”

“It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.”

“My wish [c. 1911].... of compiling a book (a kind of Almanac) in which all the contributions should be written by artists. I dreamt primarily of painters and musicians. The ruinous separation of the arts from each other, and of 'Art' from folk-art and from children's art, the distinction between 'Art' and 'Ethnography' [folk-art].... the solid walls erected between phenomena that in my eyes were so closely related, even identical: in a word, the potentialities for synthesis left me no peace. It may well seem strange today [1930] that for a long time I could not find any co-workers or any means to promote this idea..”

“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.”

“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”

“The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.”