Education Quote by Nicolas Roeg

Roeg’s line lands like a quiet manifesto from a filmmaker who built a career on refusing the heroic myth of the solitary genius. “In life, we all learn from everyone” isn’t a kumbaya sentiment so much as a sideways attack on auteur ego: the idea that vision descends fully formed from one exceptional mind. Roeg knew better because film itself is a machine for borrowing - a collaborative art stitched from actors’ instincts, editors’ nerve, a cinematographer’s eye, a producer’s constraints, and the audience’s projections. The “everyone” isn’t flattering; it’s leveling. It implies you don’t get to choose your teachers.

The intent feels practical, almost workshoppy: stay porous. Roeg’s movies often make viewers do labor - piecing time out of order, reading emotion through fracture, discovering meaning in the gaps. That method mirrors the quote’s ethic. Learning doesn’t arrive as a lecture; it arrives as collision: with people unlike you, with mistakes, with the mundane.

The subtext carries a warning. If you’re learning from everyone, you’re also being shaped by everyone - by fashion, by prejudice, by institutional routines. Roeg came up in a British film culture where class, gatekeeping, and “proper” storytelling policed what was acceptable. His work broke those rules, but it also absorbed from them: the discipline of craft, the tension between restraint and rupture.

Context matters: Roeg started as a cinematographer before directing, trained to see how meaning is manufactured frame by frame. This quote is the credo of someone who understands that authorship is an illusion you earn by listening.