Quotes from Xavier Dolan

Film-making is not liberating. It drains a lot out of you, and it's fulfilling only temporarily. It's a very thankless thing at times. When you're spending all that time on a film, you don't want 40,000 people to see it - it's just not enough. You dream of more.

I'm just trying to blur this very clear line we've drawn and are drawing over and over and over again between communities. Saying those are queer films and those are films. I would love for that line to disappear. For that frontier to be abolished once and for all.

I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I'll even quote. I don't do tributes to cinema.

I have the impression that every time I'm heartbroken, I leave a bit of myself behind. I am the believer. I go back and do the same mistakes over and over again and sign them proudly.

Men are born privileged in the scale of things - I'm generalizing, but it's true. Women have to define themselves in the eyes of men. They have to fight for their rights, especially in a society that will pretend that there is no fight or no battle, that it's a cliche, that feminists are reactionary, all these things.

I love doing costumes. The costume is an actor's first line, so it's gotta be right!

It's become a habit to make films where the father is absent. My father impresses me, but the father figure does not.

All my life, I heard, 'Stop daydreaming, ' 'Get over yourself, ' 'You'll never get there, ' 'Aim lower, ' 'You'll hurt yourself, ' from teachers, family, and friends.

I've been recording forever. I'm a watcher. I'm a stalker. I love everything about people. It's always been a passion for me to observe.

My extreme characters are in a state of rebellion or who are being ostracized or being misunderstood, or misfits or trying to fit in and fighting for their rights to love, live, and co-exist. They sort of mirror my own demons.

I think that when you're in love, you progressively go back to who you are.

What I'm interested in is how your career choices can affect your private life, romantically or with your mom, your relatives, your friends, your hometown, and how media manipulates information - not newspapers or blogs, but the magazines that people impulse-buy that tell you what's hot and who's not.

I'm very much a hypochondriac, worried about dying, and not having enough time to work with the people I want to work with and being fulfilled as an actor.

I'd love to perform with other actors and act with actors, true actors. I would like to be in a movie and have full room for acting.

No one knows me in the States because the movies have been released in such an awkward, irregular fashion, all by different distributors. There is no continuity.

I don't personally do movies for myself and a faction of very cerebral cinephiles - I do it for everybody and wish for the largest amount of people to relish whatever they find they can relish in.

I have struggles in screenwriting that lead me to a third act that's always more or less efficiently wrapped up in a fourth act that's trying to give closure to too many things.

When I first got to Cannes, I was very insecure about everything, so I put on this extravagant facade. Can you blame me? I was 19.

Six years, I didn't act. Then I wrote myself a role - I won prizes all over the world.

Adele's look is meticulously thought through and completely of her own traits. She has such a powerful beauty, such an emotional voice, and the kohl, the hair, everything feels organically molded to her personality.

I don't think the way I portray mother's and son's relationships has anything to do with my age or generation. It has to do with what I lived with my own mother and what it's transformed into and the point of view it has given me on mothers and women. The way I was brought up with women. It's all about personal background.

Of all the labels and tags and epithets people have forced upon me, there's one I don't dislike. I get called the 'enfant terrible.' In every article, it's always there. So I have to give that a meaning.

'Titanic' made me want to tell stories... To have all these characters and costumes and have ambition and think big and have dreams... It came at a very troubled period of my life.

In 'Laurence Anyways,' Nathalie Baye is Laurence's mother, and she is quite an awful mother. Still, she is the only one in the end who truly accepts her daughter.