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

Reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain.

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 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.

Today we no longer know what to call art, what its function is and even less what function it will have in the future. We know only that it is something dynamic - unlike many ideas that have governed us.

It's obvious that I must explain what I want from an actor, but I don't want to discuss everything I ask him to do, because often my requests are completely instinctive and there are things I can't explain. It's like painting: You don't know why you use pink instead of blue. You simply feel that's how it should be - pink. Then the phone rings and you answer it. When you come back, you don't want pink anymore and you use blue - without knowing why. You can't help it; that's just the way it is.

I want an actor to try to give me what I ask in the best and most exact way possible. He mustn't try to find out more, because then there's the danger that he'll become his own director.