Life should be taken ironically; otherwise, it becomes a tragedy.

Favourite directors change, like favorite authors. I had a passion for Gide and Stein and Faulkner. But now they're no use to me anymore. I've assimilated them - so, enough, they are a closed chapter. This also applies to film directors.

If an actor tries to understand too much, he will act in an intellectual and unnatural manner.

I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.

I'll go on making films until I make one that pleases me from the first to the last frame. Then I'll quit.

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

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