“I don’t see my movies. I think it’s healthier and safer to keep a bit of distance. I’m afraid to be disappointed.”

English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more – like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

The life before ’68 was very different from the life after ’68. Before ’68, our days were full of authoritarian moments. There were authorities everywhere. In fact, the movement of ’68 was young people against their authorities, children against their parents. And that remained.

Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.

I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.

For example, Jewish directors coming from Germany or Austria and enriching Hollywood. In 15, 20 years, Hollywood became imperialistic. Cinema goes ahead when it is marriaged by other culture. Otherwise, it turns on itself.

I think that what I learned then, I didn’t know I was learning. I just knew that I was very privileged to see somebody who was a writer, a great poet, and very smart-faced. Suddenly Pasolini becomes a director, so he has to invent cinema.

I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. ‘The Dreamers’ was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

A dolly move is a moral commitment.

To explore technology for me is something that I have to do. Otherwise, I feel completely left in the back… abandoned.

I was seduced by the nouvelle vague, because it was really reinventing everything. And the Italian cinema that one would see in the theaters in the late ’50s, early ’60s was Italian comedy, Italian style, which, to me, was like the end of neo-realism.

I like to be in a huis clos, as the French say – in one place. It’s something that in general can create a bit of claustrophobia. But for me, claustrophobia becomes almost immediately claustrophilia. I love it!

If New York is the Big Apple, tonight Hollywood is the Big Nipple.

I haven’t made a movie for a while, but I’ve watched a lot. It’s my major waste of time. I like to work, but also to be waiting for work.

Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.

I don’t film messages. I let the post office take care of those.

This is something that I dream about: to live films, to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting.

Someone once said a cynic is just a disappointed romantic. That really, really sums me up.

I’m not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he’s doing what he said he would do.

Extremely disappointed that corruption may have reached such a level in Mexico.

If you are tuning in just for the show, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.