“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”

“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”

“Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.”

“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”

“Every edit is a lie.”

“I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.”

“I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.”

“I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.”

“I make film to make time pass.”

“I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.”

“One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.”

“People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.”

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

“The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.”

“To be or not to be. That's not really a question.”

“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.”

“You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.”