Luis Bunuel Quotes

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

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... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

If the devil were to offer me a resurgence of what is commonly called virility, I'd decline. ''Just keep my liver and lungs in good working order,'' I'd reply, ''so I can go on drinking and smoking!''

The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.

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.

Mystery is the essential element of every work of art.

The Cinema seems to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious, the roots of which penetrate poetry so deeply

I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth.

Thank God I'm an atheist.

I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation - that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno - I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it!

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

I can't help feeling that there is no beauty without hope, struggle, and conquest.

Thank God, I am still an atheist.

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.

If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'

Refuse any image that could have a rational meaning or any memory or culture

Age is something that doesn't matter unless you're a cheese

Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.

I'm still an atheist, thank God.

A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.

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.

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.

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.

Like the majority of deaf people, I don't like blind people much.

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

Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

I think films are perishable, because they depend too much on technology, which advances too quickly and the films become old-fashioned, antiques. What I hope for is that technology advances to the point that films in the future will depend on a little pill which you take; then you sit in the dark, and from your eyes you project the film you want to see on a blank wall.

I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial-largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox-in other words,-all the things I love the most.

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

If alcohol is queen, then tobacco is her consort. It's a fond companion for all occasions, a loyal friend through fair weather and foul.

Repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than receiving an Oscar.

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.

I am an atheist, thanks be to God.

Luis Bunuel's two semishort surrealist hand grenades (cowritten in varying degrees with Salvador Dali) make a double bill that can restore your faith in the subversions of youth. Pure Spanish-Parisian piss and vinegar.