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.

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.

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.

At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.

Believe. No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted island, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.

I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation rather than the trophies of war.

In my heart of hearts my motivation would always have been to be the best, and I think that athletics is probably what I was built for.

Rapper, just puts so much connotation on who you are and what is exposed. Even if a lot of it is out-dated, people still bring a lot to it.

Actors are con men and con men are actors.

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.

What would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence?

President Obama met with leaders of the American Indian tribes and they honored the president by giving him his own Indian name: Running Deficits.

You know the movie "Rashomon" from [Takeshi] Kurosawa, when all the people in the forest see something different? Each performance was like that.