I can live in Paris for four months or London or, you know, Barcelona. These are places that are like New York. But I don't think I could live in many places. When I had to make a film in the United States I picked San Francisco because to me it's one of the great cities of America.

I never have an alter ego in the movies. That's a fiction that the press has made up over the years, and it's fun to write that. It gives them something to write.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

Sex and death. Two things that come but once in my lifetime, but at least after death you're not nauseous.

Sentence structure is innate, but whining is acquired.

I think universal harmony is a pipedream and it may be more productive to focus on more modest goals, like a ban on yodeling.

My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films.