I want to be able to control things and that's very difficult to do if you're not 100% in a particular language. It makes you uncertain and it makes you nervous.

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.

Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.

There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you.

If you can’t see a solution it does not mean it doesn’t exist, you are just blind to it

The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.

But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment." I've seen it. It's rubbish," said Zaphod,"nothing but a gnab gib." A what?" Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy.

The woman who cannot tell a lie in defense of her husband, is unworthy of the name of wife.

Cooking well doesn't mean cooking fancy.

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.

I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what [Giuseppe] Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself.