Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.

I think décor says a lot about someone's social position, their taste, their sensibility, their work - and also about the aesthetic way I have chosen to tell their story.

Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

I make movies for my needs. My goal has never, never, never been to make shocking movie.

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.

Cinema has become my life. I dont mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

A dead love never dies.

Each actor is a very different person, and each one has to be directed very differently.

All my movies are difficult to classify because they are very eclectic in mixing genres.

It is the confession, not the Priest, that gives us absolution

You are living in a time when opportunities for self-empowerment, expanded awareness and spiritual growth appear to be unlimited.

During the cold war, West Berlin was an exclave - a tiny outpost of liberalism surrounded by people who want to crush it. It was like Austin, Texas.

The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!

There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.

Life is everchanging, if you cease to change, you cease to live.

Everything in the universe is a pitcher brimming with wisdom and beauty.

DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.