"Cinema is pitiless because it is too concrete. The task of the director in cinema is to leave enough space for fantasy."

"A great artist always has a moral ideal. Mass culture doesn't have a very high moral ideal. Whenever it gets a high moral ideal, that will be a masterpiece."

"Today young people going to the cinema don't read much or, if they do read, it's on the Internet. They are used to American cinema, to fast action, fantasy and beautiful imagery. Show them an Antonioni or Tarkovsky picture now and they would die of boredom. If a Fellini film came out today, no one would need it. Because an artist appears when he wants to be heard. That's not a director's problem."

"The hardest thing, I think, is to talk simply about the complex and comprehensibly and about the incomprehensible. Pasternak was fully entitled to write poetry full of dark thought – in his day, it was natural, normal. In Pushkin's day, that wouldn't have been permitted – a poet had to be clear. Pasternak started with poetry that was very unclear in thought but, at the end of the road, he arrived at great simplicity."