A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware the beauty is summoning him.

I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.

My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be

If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens.

My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness.

Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.