I used and abused drugs and alcohol. When I stopped doing that it became a lot clearer that life goes from inside to giving as opposed to taking and destroying.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.

Regret isn't going to get me anywhere. It's like being obsessed with something. It doesn't bring you anywhere.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.

You're constantly changing man. But the film's not changing. The film stays the same. That's the beautiful aspect of it.

The director's job is to know what emotional statement he wants a character to convey in his scene or his line, and to exercise taste and judgment in helping the actor give his best possible performance.

I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.

The most terrifying fact about the universe not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent

I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.

You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity--no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001.

I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow, only of being killed.

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours.

There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.

No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.