English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

A name? Oh, Jesus Christ. Ah, God, I've been called by a million names all my life. I don't want a name. I'm better off with a grunt or a groan for a name.

Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.

As a loyal believer in the Auteur Theory I first felt editing was but the logical consequence of the way in which one shoots. But, what I learned is that it is actually another writing.

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

I think that what I learned then, I didn't know I was learning. I just knew that I was very privileged to see somebody who was a writer, a great poet, and very smart-faced. Suddenly Pasolini becomes a director, so he has to invent cinema. It was like watching the invention of cinema. But I found out that Pasolini taught me a lot. It was, especially, the kind of respect that he had for reality. He had kind of epiphanies in his movies, like when a moment becomes full of grace, and it is like as if it was the most important moment in the life of a character.

Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.