I consider all my films an experiment, at least in my mind.

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.

One of the most important thing is that you need to write down your goals and plans

To be wrecked begins with an experience that pulls you out of your comfort zone and self-centeredness, whether you want it or not.

Jewel,' he said, 'what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.

You know you've made it when you've been moulded in miniature plastic. But you know what children do with Barbie dolls - it's a bit scary, actually.

Believe in miracles. I have seen so many. They came when every indication would say that Hope was lost. Hope is never lost!

All artists are now free to express their own personality.

In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partizans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.

American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems.

When you get into making movies, then the physical mundane reality of life must be presented. But in comics you can jack it up and work in shorthand.