I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

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.

I only understand realism.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

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.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing.

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.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

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.

Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.

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.

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

Writers are not meant for action.

I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.

If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.

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?

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

As a rule, one should never place form over content.

Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

I allow my intuition to lead my path.

Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.