Accepting death is a massive problem for everybody.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky
When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair.
Society feeds terror and is in turn terrorized; we are afraid to lose, so we consume.
I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me.
Tarantino's 'Django' amused me very much. It is as made by an adult that was still a child.
Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.
We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.
We only have problems we really want to have.
All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.
Books are finished.
The Arabs have a God, the Jews have another, and the Catholics have another! And they're all fighting to maintain that they worship the one real God. Idiots!
My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.
Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.
I was like a mutant when I was a boy. I learned to read when I was four years old; it was like a miracle.
I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.
I am like the rain: I go where I'm needed.
I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.
Maybe I am a prophet. I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Muhammad, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.
Let the inner god that is in each one of us speak. The temple is your body, and the priest is your heart: it is from here that every awareness must begin.
My father was an atheist, absent. He was a salesman; I was four years old when he told me that the end of life was death.
When I brought 'El Topo' to New York, no one understood the picture. But John Lennon understood. John and Yoko Ono, they presented 'El Topo' in the United States; they introduced it.
I have always thought that, of all the arts, the cinema is the most complete art.
Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.
I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.
Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.
Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything.
If God gives you chocolate, you open your mouth, no?
If you don't make errors, how can you be conscious?
My ideal audience is on the young side, eager to mutate and move to a higher level of consciousness. I want my images to turn the viewer's brain into what it is: a flying carpet.
My ego every day is more and more polite. I tame it.
I say, 'If somebody steals something of yours, then it's good; he loves what you do.'
In movies, images cost - if you want a big image, it takes more money.
I tweet 15 times a day to keep my brain stimulated.
It's not the same thing to make a work - a film, a book, a play - about youth as it is to make one about old age.
I've seen 'Hamlet' many times, and Hamlet, he was just a hideous neurotic; he never changes. He doubts - all the way to the end, all the way until when he dies, he doubts.
Revolutions are of no us;, it is necessary to work on transforming the brain: on sowing a different knowledge/awareness, on creating a new conscience, that is like a magic box full of brains.
A true artist is always out of his time.
Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.
Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.
I liked Lady Gaga's meat dress. It was funny.
To have hands, to have fingers, is weird. Real life is weird, to have fingers?
When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don't do it.
My films are completely new. I am not similar to anybody in the history of movies.
For me 'Dune' was a dream - a big dream!
A person is not the same in his life at all times. Your consciousness is developing all the time. When I started making 'El Topo,' I was one person. When I finished that picture, I was another person.
Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.
I hated Peter O'Toole. I wanted to kill that guy! When they said he was dead, I was happy. People said, 'Poor Peter O'Toole.' I was happy!
You dream every night. Every person in the world, even if they don't remember, is dreaming every night.
I felt so alone as a boy because no one wanted to be friends with me.
I had a big problem working with stars, because they are too expensive and have too many demands. Their names help you raise the money to make the movie, but then they demand close-ups. They change things. You end up doing things at their service instead of servicing the film.
