When you speak about generosity, about something good we have inside ourselves, you're speaking to the majority.

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.

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.

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.

The most childish thing is to believe that you are an adult now...

I don't expect that because I was successful in one field that I will then get a ride of passage into another.

Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and for them and they are doing God's will.

It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.

But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.

It is astonishingly beautiful and interesting, how thought is absent when you have an insight. Thought cannot have an insight.

Some days you feel like this is really going well. You can tell. Other days, you're just drawing like a farmer and you don't know why.

To a physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ.

You can be Hitler and go to confession and say forgive me, Father, I killed six million Jews, and the priest would just be like no problem. Say 10 Heil Marys. And Hitler goes to heaven.

I've been an atheist ever since I heard there was only a stairway to heaven