And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.

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 best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.

If anyone thinks interracial "anything" is a big deal, they're probably inbred.

The life of the spirit is centrally and essentially a life of action. Spirituality is something done not merely something believed or known or experienced.

I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.

There were Hollywood movies and then there were those aggressively anti-narrative films that they showed at the Collective for Living Cinema.

Greatest god below the sky.

The way not to lead a monotonous life is to live for others.

I'm not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn't born to the purple.

We need everyone to participate to make our city safe. And we know that the vast majority of immigrants are contributing positively to our economy and to our society here in the city of New York.

I'm a minimalist at heart. If a song doesn't need a solo, I'm not going to force one into it.