Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious.
Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second.
Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.
Do I like tawdry, sleazy stories? Yeah, I do.
I think calling someone a character is a compliment.
Maybe [killers] is one of my real passions. Why deny it?
I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.
The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.
I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.
Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.
I like to think that every movie emerges from the conversations.
Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.
It's pretty clear that fame isn't inextricably connected with merit .
Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.
I've had people turn me down. Not all that many, but certainly it happens.
They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.
It's really hard to know why certain artists become famous and others don't.
The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.
People lie, and they always are very very creative in finding new ways to lie.
My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.
A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.
My advice to all interviewers is: Shut up and listen. It's harder than it sounds.
Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.
The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate [with Donald Trump].
The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.
Mike Wallace's interviews may make great television, but they don't produce great evidence.
I like to think that I'm nonjudgmental, that I can listen and be engaged by almost anything.
But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.
I taught my son to read with tabloids. We would sit to read the 'Weekly World News' together.
It's a kind of honour when I see how many people are imitating the style of how I make films.
If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing.
There is such a thing as truth, but we have a vested interest in not seeing it, in avoiding it.
In fact, part of the Netflix series is drama.Beyond re-enactments. Why not invent something new?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
Long, long before I became a filmmaker I was talking to killers. Filmmaking was an after thought.
The first Polaroid ever took of someone in my family was my son when he was about four years old.
The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.
I don't think that anybody really makes films quite like mine. That's maybe true of any filmmaker.
Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest.
I've never had any problem with crazy people. I like crazy people; I probably am a crazy person myself.
You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?
When you're working for yourself and your own obsession with finding the truth, you're at your own mercy.
The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.
If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.
There is only one direction. (Down.) There is only one color. (Black.) And there is only one number (Zero.)
It's so much easier to make a movie about someone who is so likeable that you just want to get out of the way.
Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do."
The very idea of photography is as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the 19th century, "it's a mirror with a memory."
I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular.