“Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs.”

“Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.”

“I think it's IMPOSSIBLE for anyone famous to come from here, because everyone around here is insane.”

“Who’ll come lie down in the dark with me
Belly to belly and knee to knee
Who’ll look into my hooded eye
Who’ll lie down under my darkened thigh?”

“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”

“There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.”

“Everyone has his own parents. No one comes from nowhere.”

“The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.”

“Although grace comes from above, that is not to say that everyone has the ability to accept to it.”

“My primary concept in approaching the production of THX 1138 was to make a kind of cinema verité film of the future — something that would look like a documentary crew had made a film about some character in a time yet to come.”