Rainer Werner Fassbinder Quotes

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.

Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism.

People are terrible. They can bear anything. Anything! People are hard and brutal. And everyone is disposable. Everyone! That's the lesson.

It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.

As long as movies are depressing, life isn't.

The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

For all of us it’s the things that won’t work that keep our interest.

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

The Jews have never been ashamed of being Jews, whereas homosexuals have been stupid enough to be ashamed of their homosexuality.

Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but what I've learned from his work.

So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

Better a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany!