Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression. Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life. "Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It's a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other." "I let the audience feel and think." "I'm against caricatures, I'm against parodies;if you say that this scene has the effect of a parody, then I have to take your word for it, but then I'm ashamed of myself and I apologize." "The American method of making films left the audience with emotions and nothing else; I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling." "What I would like is to make Hollywood movies, that is, movies as wonderful and universal, but at the same time not as hypocritical, as Hollywood."