- Cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms
- Perhaps no work of art *is* art. It can only *become* art, when it is part of the past
- I think it was rock&roll the reason I got divorced. I think it was Bill Haley and the Comets and Chuck Berry that made me decide to get a divorce and leave the academic world
- The youngest of the arts is also the most heavily burdened with memory. Cinema is a time machine. Movies preserve the past, resurrect the beautifil dead; present, intact, vanished or ruined environments; enbody without ironu styles and fashions that seem funny today; solemnly ponder irrelevant or naive problems. The historical particularity of the reality registered on celluloid is so vivid that practically all films older than four or five years are saturated with pathos
- One of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there
- The white race is the cancer of human history.
- I think what happened on September Eleventh was an appalling crime, and I'm astonished that I even have to say that, to reassure people that I feel that way. But I do feel that the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy.
- I'll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism." I'm not against fighting this enemy - it is an enemy and I'm not a pacifist.
- [on art] Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
- I thought I was a student. I thought I was a teacher. And then I discovered that I liked to tell stories and make people cry.
- [on cinema] To see a great film only on television isn't to have really seen that film. It's not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers. [from: "The Decay of Cinema", N.Y. Times, 1996]
- [on cinephilia] People still like going to the movies, and some people still care about and expect something special, necessary from a film. And wonderful films are still being made: Mike Leigh's Naked (1993), Gianni Amelio's Lamerica (1994), Fred Kelemen's Verhängnis (1994). But you hardly find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (...). Cinephilia itself has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish. For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. [from: "The Decay of Cinema", N.Y. Times, 1996]
- I don't like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan. And what I like about Manhattan is that it's full of foreigners.
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