“I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That’s why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they’re all out there.”

The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day.

The artist does not have to suffer to show suffering.

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

I like things that go into hidden, mysterious places, places I want to explore that are very disturbing. In that disturbing thing, there is sometimes tremendous poetry and truth.

I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas. But wood can translate ideas, too. You have wood and then you get a chair. Some ideas are for different things.

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.

Many things happen that we don’t know the significance of until a little bit later.

My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me.

I just like going into strange worlds.

Be true to yourself. Don’t take no for an answer. And start your Transcendental Meditation.

I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business – everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs.

All my movies are about strange worlds that you can’t go into unless you build them and film them. That’s what’s so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.

I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we’re all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist.

A filmmaker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don’t have to die to shoot a death scene.

The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.

Now it would be as absurd to deny the existence of God, because we cannot see him, as it would be to deny the existence of the air or wind, because we cannot see it.

We must keep our freedom of mind, and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.

A greater absurdity cannot be thought of than a morose, hardhearted, covetous, proud, malicious Christian.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

I don’t like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don’t really understand the word ‘irony’ too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it’s much more exalted.

I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.