Quotes from Alejandro Jodorowsky

I don't want to make a style. Not tragedy, not comedy. Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.

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.

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.

George Harrison wanted to play the thief in 'Holy Mountain.'

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.

I have always thought that, of all the arts, the cinema is the most complete art.

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.

I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating.

I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don't like that. I think this is some kind of fascism - 'You need to react like that.' No. No. It's not like this; everyone needs to react as he can.

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

We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.

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.

For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

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

All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.

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

We are all working for the immortality of the human consciousness.

When I'm tired, I see industrial pictures. But I'll see one every two months. If I see one every day, I'll become an idiot.

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!

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

You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.

In movies, images cost - if you want a big image, it takes more money.

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.