The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

If you have $300,000 to shoot a cigarette on a table, it's an enormous amount of money. Maybe that's why my movies are the way they are. But it's the only way I can make a living.

I have no desire to vote for French politicians, and I'm not entitled to vote in Switzerland.

You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.

I write and film history; I don't make it.

Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)

I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.