Elle Fanning was fifteen when we started [The Neon Demon]. She turned seventeen during the shoot. Four weeks before Cannes, she turned eighteen. She had her prom at Cannes.

Like all art forms, film is a media as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; the only difference is that war destroys and film inspires.

I don't believe that art makes people violent in any way. I don't. But I do believe art can show people how to be violent and that's much more dangerous in a way.

I think that I am a pornographer, meaning that I make movies based on what excites me and what I would like to see.

The artificial world that we create through images will essentially become real.

Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.

Creativity is narcissism. Creativity is falling in love with one's self as you create. It's self-indulgent.

In a way, art is a great way to release your love, fantasy, and desires. It's like a fetish. It's a comfortable way of excising a lot of your conscience.

Look at the birth of anything; it's always more violent than anything you could ever imagine.

We live in a beauty-obsessed culture, which on one hand is absolutely fabulous, but on the flip side, is also dangerously extreme.

Understanding one's own power is more interesting than someone being given something powerful.

Never tickle a sleeping dragon.

Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.

The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.

We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.

When people protest and are upset with a movie, it becomes a big hit. They hated Passion of The Christ, it worked out pretty well for the box office. So let's get that going.

I am always outside and couldn't care less about what's on TV these days.

The French people have chosen change. This change I will put into place.

I was engaged in all the required courses of math and geometry, but the area that I blossomed in was the art program.

a celebrity is someone who no longer does the things that made him a celebrity.

Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and ye can; But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill Man!