Quotes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.

Women think in [Douglas] Sirk's films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It's something that has to be seen. It's great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.

It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.

For all of us it's the things that won't work that keep our interest.

And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable - they should be taken absolutely seriously.

People are terrible. They can bear anything. Anything! People are hard and brutal. And everyone is disposable. Everyone! That's the lesson.

I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.

And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable - they should be taken absolutely seriously.

Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

As long as movies are depressing, life isn't.

The Jews have never been ashamed of being Jews, whereas homosexuals have been stupid enough to be ashamed of their homosexuality.

The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a German film.

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.

For all of us it's the things that won't work that keep our interest.

Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but what I've learned from his work.