“Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?”

“But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.”

“You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.”

“Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.”

“That's the greatest sin a director can commit”

“To tell you the truth, in my work, love is always in opposition to the elements. It creates dilemmas. It brings in suffering. We can't live with it, and we can't live without it. You'll rarely find a happy ending in my work.”

“I like chance meetings - life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.”

“Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?”

“We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.”

“[on Rouge] This is a film about communication that disappears. We have better and better tools and less and less communication with each other. We only exchange information.”

“Regardless of the subject of my films … I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see a man weeping at the bus stop, when I observe people struggling vainly to get close to others, when I see someone eating up the left-overs in a cheap restaurant, when I see the first blotches on a woman's hand and know that she too is bitterly aware of them, when I see the kind of appalling and irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face. I want this pain to come across to my audience, to see this physical agony, which I think I am beginning to fathom, to seep into my work.”