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.

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

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.

Pain becomes proud because it believes no one else understands.

Words have power.

I'm not interested in being liked.

Successful people make their decisions quickly and change their minds slowly. Failures make their decisions slowly and change their minds quickly.

I'm reading scripts, desperately wanting to work. I've set a couple of things up for next year

The best remedy for a sick church is to put it on a missionary diet.

Nothing is ever really yours until you share it.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

It certainly strikes the beholder with astonishment, to perceive what vast difficulties can be overcome by the pigmy arms of little mortal man, aided by science and directed by superior skill.

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.