If you make the right choice in casting, your work is nearly done already. You don't have to spend a lot of time directing the actors, because they're so well suited to the parts.

It's always more interesting and more difficult to make something positive than negative. To be negative is very easy.

For me, the most important word in cinema is the word freedom. For example, in Europe, we've got freedom, we've got the final cut and that's something which is marvellous.

I like the cinema of people like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. I am not keen on trying to reproduce reality - for that you should do documentaries.

I believe in imagination. I was a worker when I was 17. Between 17 and 21, I was a worker in the telephone company and imagination saved my life.

It's always been pretty easy for me to exercise my imagination. The other part of the brain, the one that does mathematics, is a nightmare for me. It doesn't work at all.

I've never made any concessions, so I am 100% responsible for my films. This makes me feel very proud.

All day my mind drifts off into fantasies and little stupid jokes.

In the States, I learned to fight for every idea. Sometimes, a director has to be a tyrant to keep the quality.

I like looking back at people's faces in the dark. I like noticing details that no one else sees. But I hate it in the old American movies when drivers don't watch the road.

In general, I have some precise ideas about everything, because the film is completed in my head before we ever start shooting. With casting, I am always present, even for the smallest character.

O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away

...I could feel what was left of my soul just slipping away as I fed on that girl until she was totally and completely drained.

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

It tickles me, my daughter said that to me. She said, "Mommie, why is it that every time they say your name they put your age right behind it?"

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

Record labels today are much less patient: Artists have a bad record, and they're gone.

Sometimes I think I have the best job in the world.

If you ever manage to become perfect, you have to die instantly before you ruin things for everyone else.

It's good to see that America has a hub for electronic music in Vegas, like Europe has with Ibiza.

If your activities don't match your priorities, you are wasting your life.