Quotes from Nicolas Roeg

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.

You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.

Mirrors are the essence of movies.

I've always thought there was something very marvelous and magical about mirrors, and that they are connected to memory as well.

The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don't know them, then something is missing.

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.

When a book is just a plot, you know, two men fight for the love of a woman in a wild frontier, I immediately ask, 'Why?'

Nature repeats itself, but it never starts from the beginning.

You cannot intellectualize yourself out of obsession. You cannot cure yourself of it.

I've never tried to enhance my reputation. Never moved upwards from one thing to another. That sort of thing is of no interest to me at all.

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.

When I went to the cinema as a boy, when I saw a war film, I thought the general was the star, and that Cary Grant was an extra. I had no idea about the structure of film, but I loved going to the cinema.

Men and women's needs and desires overlap but go in different directions as well.

But in marketing, the familiar is everything, and that is controlled by the studio. That is reaching its apogee now.

I think the big studios shaped and formed the artists that they put under contract.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

When you admire someone's work, you are amazed by who you think they are.

Children's finger-painting came under the arts, but movies didn't.

Oh, some of my films have been attacked with absolute vitriol!

I generally try to avoid talking about my old films - I find it difficult.

'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.

And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.

Movies are not scripts - movies are films they're not books, they're not the theatre.