Quotes from Alejandro Jodorowsky

The tarot is sacred.

When I started to pay income tax, I was 50 years old.

Maybe I am a prophet. I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Muhammad, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.

Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture.

I am like the rain: I go where I'm needed.

Accepting death is a massive problem for everybody.

Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.

I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.

I don't believe in failing. I have dignity.

Failure doesn't exist. It's only a change of direction.

If art is not a medicine for the society, it is a poison.

Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.

I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life.

Every artist - even if they do Superman, they do Batman, and things like that - they are speaking about his life. Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

A person is not the same in his life at all times. Your consciousness is developing all the time. When I started making 'El Topo,' I was one person. When I finished that picture, I was another person.

Society feeds terror and is in turn terrorized; we are afraid to lose, so we consume.

When the bull's-eye becomes as big in your mind as an elephant, you are sure to hit it.

Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life.

In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.

My father was an atheist, absent. He was a salesman; I was four years old when he told me that the end of life was death.

I don't live in France; I live in myself.

The first thing I didn't understand was my life. It's a mystery. And today I don't understand economy or politics. I don't know why politics or economy are destroying the world, but I will understand after understanding.

My films are completely new. I am not similar to anybody in the history of movies.