"During the 1960s I spent my time going to Hollywood movies, following the spirit of the Cahiers du cinéma. Written on the Wind is an explosion of cinematic style and of melodramatic excess. It stands for my love of Sirk but also for the extraordinary genius of all those 1950s directors whose careers came to an end before their time. And Sirk also leads forward to the great R. W. Fassbinder, especially to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul."

"This is many people’s least favorite Rohmer film. Yes, the main character is a bit charmless, but the film is astonishingly pure – the story of one man’s journey on foot through Paris, over the course of a few days. It’s also quite dark. We follow the main character's descent into vagrancy, and gradually – like him – start to see Paris from a perspective very unusual for 1950s movies: distant, cold, alienated. A brilliant anomaly among Rohmer’s films. "