Top 66 Alejandro Jodorowsky Quotes

The Arabs have a God, the Jews have another, and the Catholics have another! And they’re all fighting to maintain that they worship the one real God. Idiots!

I never wanted to study art. And I don’t think you need to study art if you are an artist. It’s even dangerous to go to school. You need to do whatever you want, as you want.

I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me.

If you don’t make errors, how can you be conscious?

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

My second wife, the mother of one of my sons, died of murder. I was not with her, but I could have saved her. I think.

I am not a commercial industry creator. I don’t believe in making art to make money.

I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.

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

Revolutions are of no us;, it is necessary to work on transforming the brain: on sowing a different knowledge/awareness, on creating a new conscience, that is like a magic box full of brains.

I have always thought that, of all the arts, the cinema is the most complete art.

Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything.

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

We are all working for the immortality of the human consciousness.

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.

I’m a purist.

The world is not violent. But there is a lot of violence in it.

Don’t make your living with cinema because Hollywood will take you, will eat you, will destroy you. This is the reality. You have a good picture, have success, you take the person and they destroy you.

When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don’t do it.

I hated Peter O’Toole. I wanted to kill that guy! When they said he was dead, I was happy. People said, ‘Poor Peter O’Toole.’ I was happy!

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the ‘Pope of Surrealism.’ And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.

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

It’s so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.

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

In Chile, they have no movies. They have awful popular movies.

Scientific thought and the miraculous unconscious are two waves in the same ocean.

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

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

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.

I don’t want to just love my family; I want to love all of humanity.

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

I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I don’t believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too old now; it’s from another century, it’s not for today.

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.

I didn’t want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. ‘I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.’ I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, ‘This is me! This is me!’

I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don’t like that. I think this is some kind of fascism – ‘You need to react like that.’ No. No. It’s not like this; everyone needs to react as he can.

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

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.

‘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.

Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal.

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

I am still radical!

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.

When I’m tired, I see industrial pictures. But I’ll see one every two months. If I see one every day, I’ll become an idiot.

Surrealism was necessary – essential, even – in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early ’60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.

You dream every night. Every person in the world, even if they don’t remember, is dreaming every night.

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.

My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.

George Harrison wanted to play the thief in ‘Holy Mountain.’

Books are finished.

My ego every day is more and more polite. I tame it.

Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures: because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong.

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.

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.

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.

My wife is 37 years younger than me. I don’t feel the difference.

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

When my father died, I did not cry. When my cat died three days later, I cried a lot.

Pretty soon we will no longer have movies. We will have television series only.

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

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

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.

The tarot is sacred.

For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

I was a happy man, never working. Sometimes I saw days with no money to eat. It was not so difficult.