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.

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.

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.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.

I close my eyes and melt in its embrace, basking in the sweetest balm of forgiveness: that for which one need not even ask.

The man who doesn't howl at the moon when his mother dies is no man at all.

...and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over any lips, my hands!

I wanted to be a forest ranger or a coal man. At a very early age, I knew I didn't want to do what my dad did, which was work in an office.

There aren't any embarrassing questions — just embarrassing answers.

I don't have to hide or be somebody I'm not. I don't have to compromise. I can just be myself.

I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

There is no beauty without some strangeness