“To share a lot of ideas – not ideas – emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.”

In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.

Sometimes I say, If I had seen some masterpieces, maybe I wouldn’t have dared start. I started very – not innocent, but naïve in a way.

I’ve always been like this – trying to find adventure where it’s still in its first élan – the first spring.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer. Women have to make jokes about themselves, laugh about themselves, because they have nothing to lose.

People know it’s not easy, and even though you have strong feeling and desire and endless love, it doesn’t always happen.

You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling.

My grandson says I’m punk.

I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.

I’d been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that’s part of being shy.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.

Even Vagabond – it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

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.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

I was free always. I could work without the money, to film this and that. But this is another point, because now I’m alone, and I can just use it when I want.

There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.

Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

I created this ‘ideal America.’ Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, ‘Oh, I don’t belong here, either.’

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.