Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work. Just yesterday I saw a good film, but even if I'd seen a bad one, I'd feel, "Oh my god, what a bad job, I can do better."

The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.

You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing. But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.

You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling.

I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.

To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States - black people didn't have the right to vote.

I didn't see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn't have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me. I started totally free and crazy and innocent. Now I've seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don't do commercials, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing.