Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

For all of us it’s the things that won’t work that keep our interest.

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.

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.

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

The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, Im convinced, bad ones, because they made people sick. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.