You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.

When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.

A film that can be described in words is not really a film.

A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

A film you can explain in words is not a real film.

The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing...

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

I always mistrust everything I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known.

It has taken me years to learn this, but it does seem to be the case if that I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

Life without love is a lonely path.

I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.

Compassion is not helpless pity, but an awareness and determination that demands action.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They're a kind of job insurance.

Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'

But I am more than a name. More than they tell me

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

I know enough to know that no man is an island.