Quotes from Alejandro Jodorowsky

I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.

When I brought 'El Topo' to New York, no one understood the picture. But John Lennon understood. John and Yoko Ono, they presented 'El Topo' in the United States; they introduced it.

My grandfather was a very mystical guy who travelled from Argentina to Chile, across the mountains with a donkey, carrying the Torah.

I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.

I say, 'If somebody steals something of yours, then it's good; he loves what you do.'

It's not the same thing to make a work - a film, a book, a play - about youth as it is to make one about old age.

One day I was sitting in my own pain, and suddenly all the pain and troubles of the world came to me. I received all the pain of the world, all through my body.

A true artist is always out of his time.

I liked Lady Gaga's meat dress. It was funny.

Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.

My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.

I tweet 15 times a day to keep my brain stimulated.

Humanity are not individuals; we are collective. And if we have difference, we have wars all the time. We have crisis. We need to open our mind. This is the only solution we have.

I don't regret any past. I am not there. I am not sorry not to make pictures, because I know one day I will do it. I intend to live 150 years.

Psychoanalysis wants to heal with words and speaking, but sometimes with speaking, you realize nothing.

'Santa Sangre' is the picture I love the best, myself, because 'El Topo' and 'The Holy Mountain' I made with my head, and 'Santa Sangre' I made with my feelings, with my heart. It's an emotional picture. And it's more real for me, that picture.

If God gives you chocolate, you open your mouth, no?

I was like a mutant when I was a boy. I learned to read when I was four years old; it was like a miracle.

I've seen 'Hamlet' many times, and Hamlet, he was just a hideous neurotic; he never changes. He doubts - all the way to the end, all the way until when he dies, he doubts.

The worse the newspapers speak of the world, the better I feel.

I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal.

Tarantino's 'Django' amused me very much. It is as made by an adult that was still a child.

Today a picture has value if it makes a lot of money. Myself, I declare I want to make a picture to lose money. Really! I want to lose money.