I sensed a mutual indifference behind polite smiles and had the overwhelming impression that, more and more frequently, I was watching people who didn't really know why they were living.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

[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.

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

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.

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