Terrence Malick

“Perhaps when I have 10 films behind me, I will have something worth saying.”

“I have trouble working off things that are too preconceived, like storyboards.”

“Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything.”

“There's a good many pictures I'd like to make; we'll see how many I'll be allowed to make.”

“Martin Sheen was extraordinary. He's a very gifted man.”

“When things become too prepared, the life comes out of it.”

“I came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to study at the AFI.”

“I film quite a bit of footage, then edit. Changes before your eyes, things you can do and things you can't. My attitude is always 'let it keep rolling.'”

“I was not a good teacher; I didn't have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else.”

“I prefer working behind the camera.”

“If you try to make things happen, they start to feel presented. They start to feel premeditated.”

“You can't live in Austin and escape the music.”

“It was in Austin that I had the idea for 'Days of Heaven.' I found myself alone for a summer in the town I had left as a high school student. There were those green, undulating hills, and this very beautiful river, the Colorado. The place is inspired and inspiring.”

“Children's books are full of violence.”

“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”

“When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them they could only come up with what's most public.”

“I'd always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else.”