I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies.

I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.