Alejandro Jodorowsky

“The planet is ill, everyone knows that. But I need to be optimistic, otherwise I would just be adding to the negativity. So every night I come on Madrid TV and read a piece of good news.”

“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.”

“When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair.”

“Don't make your living with cinema because Hollywood will take you, will eat you, will destroy you. This is the reality. You have a good picture, have success, you take the person and they destroy you.”

“I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures: because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong.”

“If you don't make errors, how can you be conscious?”

“I was a happy man, never working. Sometimes I saw days with no money to eat. It was not so difficult.”

“My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.”

“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 films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.”

“I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me.”

“For me 'Dune' was a dream - a big dream!”

“When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don't do it.”

“I tweet 15 times a day to keep my brain stimulated.”

“Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.”

“When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.”

“I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.”

“We only have problems we really want to have.”

“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.”

“When my father died, I did not cry. When my cat died three days later, I cried a lot.”