As a European filmmaker, you can not make a genre film seriously. You can only make a parody.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.

Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself

I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.

If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears with my work. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.

Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.

Some live life passionately, some live just to be alive, while some are already dead and are waiting for it to be official. Live your life to the fullest so your legacy won't ever die.

She never answered. She couldn’t. All she could do was stare, reaching toward him with her gaze alone, pulling him to drown in the sorrow of those depthless black pools.

Would Jove appoint some flower to reign, in matchless beauty on the plain, the Rose (mankind will all agree). The Rose the queen of flowers should be.

It's easy to get wrapped up in sharing everyday life with a partner. It's fun to get lost in love and romance. It's the best. But holding on to yourself while doing that is the most important thing.

People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

Usually, the best ideas come from having to fix a really hard problem.

Do not go to the garden of flowers! O friend! go not there; In your body is the garden of flowers. Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the infinite beauty.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

As a ballplayer, I would be delighted to do it again. As an individual, I doubt if I could possibly go through it again.

It often requires more strength and judgment to resist than to embrace an opportunity. It is better to do nothing than to do other than well.