“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”

Now I’m an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.

There are three intolerable things in life – cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.

The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.

Personally, I don’t like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she’ll fool her husband, I figure she’ll fool me.

I’ve never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies. Egotism and laziness. And they’re all lit like television shows.

I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

The fields have eyes, and the woods have ears.

I am still alive then. That may come in useful.

If you kill me, I promise you – you will never take me alive.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

It is on this beautiful day that we celebrate the Fuhrers birthday and thank him for he is the only reason why Germany is still alive today

In my dreams you conjure me like a spell in the night. Let us haunt one another with uneasy peace, and die burning alive.