Luis Bunuel Quotes

Thank God I'm an atheist!

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.

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

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.

Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.

A life without memory is no life at all

I'm still an atheist, thank God.

For me, it was a film about passion, l’amour fou, the irresistible force that thrusts two people together, and about the impossibility of their ever becoming one.

(I’ve always believed that the imagination is a spiritual quality that, like memory, can be trained and developed.)

The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself.

Auch das praktische Leben ist ein schwarzes Loch, das uns in den Tod führt. Revolution, Anarchie, Freiheit sind der Lohn des Denkens. Sie haben nur einen einzigen Thron, unseren Kopf.

(In the annals of Parisian cultural history, the episode is still known as “the scandal of L’Age d’or.”) A week later, Police Chief Chiappe closed the theatre; the film was censored, and remained so for fifty years.

I love dreams, even when they’re nightmares, which is usually the case. My dreams are always full of the same familiar obstacles, but it doesn’t matter. My amour fou—for the dreams themselves as well as the pleasure of dreaming—is the single most important thing I shared with the surrealists.

More than anything else, surrealism was a kind of call heard by certain people everywhere—in the United States, in Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia—who, unknown to one another, were already practicing instinctive forms of irrational expression.

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 … provided I can remember them.

No one’s really interested in other people’s dreams, so I won’t dwell on the subject, although I find it impossible to explain a life without talking about the part that’s underground—the imaginative, the unreal.

No matter what the cost, I wanted to stay a surrealist.