It’s harder to write a story with just two people in a room than with 50 characters.

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.

The greatest people in history were those who lived a life of significance and service. You can join them if you’re willing to serve.

Be patient and wait for the due harvest.

There is a Pirate in every one of us.

I can never say a line someone else has given me, which is why script meetings on TV shows always go terribly for me.

As a matter of fact, you know, Jesus probably would be, except for one or two issues, a liberal Democrat if he were around today.

Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it.

Holy Scripture could never lie or err...its decrees are of absolute and inviolable truth.

The abuse of the best things is always detrimental.

People are going to wake up to this great reservoir of music we've created in America - cakewalks, one-steps, boogie-woogie, country and western. I had a bit to do with one of those traditions.

With songs, I've always pledged to be honest. I write my songs because I've lived them.