It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.

The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

People are terrible. They can bear anything. Anything! People are hard and brutal. And everyone is disposable. Everyone! That's the lesson.

As long as movies are depressing, life isn't.

Better a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany!

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.

Women think in Sirk's films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It's something that has to be seen.