A biography for Nicolas Roeghasn’t been written yet.
“Our lives are full of all the genres. Fear and hope and sadness.”
“I generally try to avoid talking about my old films - I find it difficult.”
“There was a village watercolour society and they'd come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously.”
“Critics reach that age when it is as valuable and daring to hold a negative opinion as it is for a positive. We learn and understand from both.”
“I like the probability of the impossible.”
“I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.”
“In life, we all learn from everyone.”
“Nature repeats itself, but it never starts from the beginning.”
“I came up the old-fashioned way - tea boy, cutter, focus-puller, cinematographer - but I wasn't myself old-fashioned.”
“You cannot intellectualize yourself out of obsession. You cannot cure yourself of it.”
“'Puffball' is a love story... no, it's a life story.”
“Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated. Marketing is the death of invention, because marketing deals with the familiar.”
“Our memory and the movies keep movie stars alive for us, and Tony Curtis is still a star.”
“People are mistaken to view cinema as some sort of gimmick. It's very much ingrained in the ways in which we understand each other.”
“My father was an extraordinary man.”
“Film can be more of a reality than a page with words can ever be.”
“Oh, some of my films have been attacked with absolute vitriol!”
“I think the big studios shaped and formed the artists that they put under contract.”
“Youth is so exciting. It'll take over. I don't want to be swept away. I want to be with the taking-over people, right to the end.”
“Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.”