Quotes

My cinema is an extension of myself. A sort of life-testimony of my vital experience, with my few virtues and my numerous limitations.

For me, the most important thing that I have to accomplish is to be a good father. That's the most difficult challenge of my life. That's the most important thing for me, more than films.

'Biutiful' is not about death. It's about life. It's a hymn to life.

You can better embrace life, you can enjoy it more, when you are conscious that it will end. You bite life.

We have these ambitions that are very hard to accomplish because life puts us in our place. We have this battle with mediocrity.

I think that when we wrestle with death... we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.

For me, it is especially important to maintain my interior life. My spirituality, my connectedness. That is the way I think. That is the way I deal with life and tough moments. I keep in touch with something bigger than me. And I connect with people who have an interior life - a connection with something bigger than them.

Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music. But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things.

Actors are exposed in a way that nobody else can understand. They are subject to the likes and dislikes of people their entire life, no matter how successful they are. At the same time, in order to be liked, you have to not be yourself. So it's a very complicated human exercise - an alchemy that I have never understood.

I don't have a career. I have a life.

When I was about to turn 50, I went into a kind of personal revision and observed my own priorities and what led those priorities in my life. And many things that, in a way, were profound.

I'm always surprised when some director says, 'When I saw this film, that changed my life.' I don't have that.

I define myself from a vision, from a point of view of life.

I didn't have a normal academic career. I never studied cinema. I learned from life.

It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party. When you get to the holidays, if you think that the holidays will be forever, you just take it for granted. But, if you know that you have just three days at the beach, you will be so happy to be there every day.

We are the only alive creatures that are mortals; the animals are immortal, which is why they live stupidly. We are the only creatures that know that we will die, but that is a gift. It's important because we know we have to take advantage and squeeze life and understand why we're here in the first place.

3D is the way we experience life.

I learned there are ways to approach life. You can never change the events, but you can change the way you approach them.

I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.

Life is beautiful, what do you think? In the morning I say, 'Ah, I am alive still!' All my friends die already. I am alive. It is fantastic.

Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.

To have hands, to have fingers, is weird. Real life is weird, to have fingers?

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.

Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life.

I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life.