You can't go to an LSD or pot party unless you take it yourself. If I want to go, I must take drugs myself.

I never think in terms of alienation; it's the others who do. Alienation means one thing to Hegel, another to Marx and yet another to Freud; so it is not possible to give a single definition, one that will exhaust the subject. It is a question bordering on philosophy, and I'm not a philosopher nor a sociologist. My business is to tell stories, to narrate with images - nothing else. If I do make films about alienation - to use that word that is so ambiguous - they are about characters, not about me.

Fitzgerald said a very interesting thing in his diary; that human life proceeds from the good to the less good - that is, it's always worse as you go on. That's true.

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

I dislike judging myself, but I will say I would be wealthy today if I had accepted all the films that have been offered to me with large sums of money. But I've always refused, in order to do what I felt like doing.