I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating.

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.

I don't want to make a style. Not tragedy, not comedy. Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.

Don't make your living with cinema because Hollywood will take you, will eat you, will destroy you. This is the reality. You have a good picture, have success, you take the person and they destroy you.

I don't live in France; I live in myself.

And I imagine... with great pleasure... all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsion and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live.