Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.

I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.

So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

Since I'm not a second Marx or Freud who can offer people alternatives, I have to let them keep their own wrong feelings. And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable-they should be taken absolutely seriously.

Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.