You can make a thousand different movies about the same subject.

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.

I think décor says a lot about someone's social position, their taste, their sensibility, their work - and also about the aesthetic way I have chosen to tell their story.

Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

I make movies for my needs. My goal has never, never, never been to make shocking movie.

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.

Cinema has become my life. I dont mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

A dead love never dies.

Each actor is a very different person, and each one has to be directed very differently.

In love, in war, truth is rubber that can be pulled and stretched into an infinite number of shapes.

It is obvious to you that the struggle will be an unequal one, but I shall make it - I shall make it as long as I have an ounce of strength left in me, or any life left in me.

He who is unconscious of the ties which connect him with every individual of his species feels no obligation to make sacrifices for their welfare or happiness.

That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.

When someone you love dies, you don't lose them all at once. You lose them in pieces over time, like how the mail stops coming.

When you meet somebody who is vulnerable, there is an attraction. There is something to that. There is beauty there.

Patience puts up with those you'd like to put down

We Americans, we're a simple people . . . but piss us off, and we'll bomb your cities.

In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten.

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.