...the Church is the merciless heart of the State.

When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.

The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.

Football is the last sacred ritual of our time.

Truth lies not only in a dream, but in many dreams.

It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression - to express reality through reality.

The power of consumer goods . . . has been engendered by the so-called liberal and progressive demands of freedom, and, by appropriating them, has emptied them of their meaning, and changed their nature.