I've always believed that true cinema is cinema of the imagination.

When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.

In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.

My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.

The important thing is to make a different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is everything.

When you manage to express something with a look and the music instead of saying it with words or having the character speak, I think it's a more complete work.

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.

Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.

You see in Once Upon a Time in the West the whole film moves around her [Claudia Cardinale]. If you take her out, there's no more film. She's the central motor of the entire happening.

There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.

I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.

We see that the vast majority of our suffering is needless, and simply arises from the misidentification with our thinking mind.

He didn't believe in magic and demons. He believed in day and night, endurance and fury, cold mud and loneliness and the speed with which blood leaves the body

You can’t keep messing me around like this. It’s been going on too long. I can’t take it anymore. I get sick every time you come around. Then I get sick when you leave. You’re like a disease to me.

The biggest challenge was to make sure that we are looking at things honestly and truthfully. We weren't making an apologist film. That was the toughest part.

Lean back into the arms of grace.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by.

As one door closes, another one shuts.

Once you’re sensitized to the negative effects of unhealthy choices, it gets easier to turn down what used to seem impossible to resist.

I'm not a regular mom, I'm a cool mom.