My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.
One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.
I only understand realism.
I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.
I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.
Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.
Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.
I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.
I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.
I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.
I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.
Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.
The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
I would very much like to become a best-selling author.
It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.
The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.
My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.
If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.
Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.
