Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

I supply my own angels and demons. I exist on a stony beach, which lowers itself in waves toward a protective ocean. A dog barks; a child cries; the day sinks and becomes night. You can never scare me. No human being will be able to scare me ever again. I have a prayer that I repeat to myself in absolute stillness: May a wind come to stir up the ocean and the stifling twilight. May a bird come from water out there and explode the silence with its call.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.

I feel very strongly that I’m surrounded by other realities.

Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.