I was called the greatest director in Europe, but I was just a hard worker.

Women have always been my best friends.

It is just that all my life I have been so involved in my work that I guess one could say in general that, whenever I had to balance my private life and my profession,...

In America, sex is preached; in France, it is done.

You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that’s a fairy tale – definitely.

Cinemascope is not for men, but for snakes and funerals.

Each picture has some sort of rhythm which only the director can give it. He has to be like the captain of a ship.

I am not an artist. I am a craftsman.

I do not like producers.

I like folk songs, but ten horses couldn’t bring me to a concert or an opera.

I was something that is always hated in Hollywood – a perfectionist; nobody likes a perfectionist, you know.

For me, cinema is a vice. I love it intimately.

Music is the same to me as it was to Goethe – a pleasant noise. I am an eye man, not an ear man.

I am profoundly fascinated by cruelty, fear, horror and death. My films show my preoccupation with violence, the pathology of violence.

My private life has nothing to do with my films.