I'm far more relaxed with German. I'm a control freak. I like to know exactly who's saying and doing what.

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.

Write until your fingers break. It may be the cure for everything.

You are the illness I will never cure. You are the poem I will never write. You are the thought I will never finish. You are the text I will never read.

The biggest barrier in communication is that tendency of listening to reply and not to understand.

If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.

This kind of love doesn't work very well, it destorys the nature of love.

It is not the hours of practice that matter...it's what you put into the hours that counts.

Now you see me, now you don't. George thinks he will, but I know he won't!

Where hope would otherwise become hopelessness, it becomes faith.

I've found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.

Axl and I came from completely different backgrounds. Because of that we made an interesting pair trying to figure each other out.