“If you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way. I think that’s the way I felt when I was young.”

I was a photographer first.I worked alone. I did it my way as much as I could. I have been sort of courageous about doing things, because I didn’t think I should do less than my brothers.

I had beautiful jewelery around me, and when I lost I would take the jewelery and say, Service – being very generous, because it was very expensive jewelery. I would say, Tip.

I think it’s ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do.

To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States – black people didn’t have the right to vote.

I don’t believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue … It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.

I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more.

She almost doesn’t recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We’re the ones who are suffering. She’s not.

I’m still fighting. I don’t know how much longer, but I’m still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

I think people should be different. I love people who don’t go by the rule that you have to be careful because you’re old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that.

But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.

It’s a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It’s a long process to let it happen.

I’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

The film critics don’t know my artwork and the art world doesn’t know my films.

You know, an hour and fifty-four minutes is too much for audiences. They get nervous.

I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it’s been a struggle.

I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to will something into him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to live.

It was so gorgeous it almost felt like sadness.

I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.

I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.

I was a fight to the death, and I felt great.

He felt warm and familiar. He felt solid and safe. I wanted to cling to his shirt, bury my face into the warm curve of his neck, and never let go.

Patch? Whatever happens, i love you.” i wanted to say more, those three words painfully inadequate for the way i felt about him. And at the same time, so simple and accurate, nothing else would do.

If you can’t feel, why did you kiss me?” patch traced a finger along my collarbone, then headed south stopping at my heart. I felt it pounding through my skin. “because i feel it here, in my heart,” he said quietly.