In German. I'm more sensitized to the details, to the emotions. In English, I wouldn't detect as much nuance.

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.

Men and women often judge what they don't really know.

It's not an old book, or a treasure map. Nope. Staring up at me was a pile of rocks.

Need is choice come to fruition.

Damon Runyon. A day-coach boy in a parlor car seat.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country but we turned them into coffee drinkers.

I always tried to make a diverse album in terms of emotions and sounds.

We exist solely because we have a body and a mind ? a mind that arises out of the body. If this were true, we would cease to exist after our body was gone.

The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.