Luis Buñuel Quotes

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

Nothing would disgust me more morally than winning an Oscar.

Age is something that doesn`t matter, unless you are a cheese.

The bar . . . is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable - and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a client that doesn`t like to talk.

I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.

Thank God, I`m an atheist.

Sex without religion is like cooking an egg without salt. Sin gives more chances to desire.

A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made.

I love dreams, even when they`re nightmares, which is usually the case. My dreams are full of the same obstacles, but it doesn`t matter. My amour fou for the dreams themselves as I shared with the surrealists. Un chien andalou (1929) was born of the encounter between my dreams and (Salvador Dalí)`s. Later, I brought the dreams directly into my films, trying as hard as I could to avoid any analysis. `Don`t worry if the movie`s too short`, I once told a Mexican producer. `I`ll just put in a dream.` He was not impressed.

All my life I`ve been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.

Don`t ask me my opinions on art, because I don`t have any. Aesthetic concerns have played a relatively minor role in my life, and I have to smile when a critic talks, for example, of my "palette". I find it impossible to spend hours in galleries analyzing and gesticulating. Where (Pablo Picasso)`s concerned, his legendary facility is obvious, but sometimes I`m repelled by it. I can`t stand "Guernica", which I nonetheless helped to hang. Everything about it makes me uncomfortable--the grandiloquent technique as well as the way it politicizes art. Both Alberti and (José Bergamín) share my aversion; in fact, all three of us would be delighted to blow up the painting, but I suppose we`re too old to start playing with explosives.

`God and Country` are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

Frankly, despite my horror of the press, I`d love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers.

In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

To compare me with Goya is a nonsense. Critics speak of Goya because they don`t know anything about Quevedo, Theresa of Avila, the picaresque literature, Galdòs, (Ramón del Valle-Inclán) and others . . . Today`s culture is unfortunately inseparable from economic and military power. A ruling nation can impose its culture and give a worldwide fame to a second-rate writer like (Ernest Hemingway). (John Steinbeck) is important due to American guns. Had (John Dos Passos) and (William Faulkner) been born in Paraguay or in Turkey, who`d read them?

If someone were to prove to me right this minute that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn`t change a single aspect of my behavior.

The films that influenced me the most, however, were Fritz Lang`s. When I saw Müde Tod, Der (1921), I suddenly knew that I too wanted to make movies. It wasn`t the three stories themselves that moved moved me so much, but the main episode--the arrival of the man in the black hat, whom I instantly recognized as Death, in a Flemish village, and the scene in the cemetery. Something about this film spoke to something deep in me; it clarified my life and my vision of the world. This feeling occurred whenever I saw a Lang movie, particular the `Nibelungen` movies, and Metropolis (1927).

Give me two hours a day of activity, and I`ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.

If you were to ask me if I`d ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I`d have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead.

I have a soft spot for secret passageways, bookshelves that open into silence, staircases that go down into a void, and hidden safes. I even have one myself, but I won`t tell you where. At the other end of the spectrum are statistics which I hate with all my heart.

I`ve always found insects exciting.

Tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries.

(When asked why he made movies) To show that this is not the best of all possible worlds.

Salvador Dalí seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman`s shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door.

J`aime la solitude, à condition qu`un ami vienne m`en parler de temps en temps. (I like solitude, as long as someone drops by to chat about it from time to time.)

I`m still an atheist, thank God.