Quotes

Every time I'm shooting a movie I want to kill myself. Because I don't see the light in the end of the tunnel.

I am finished with cities. I spent four years in New York, 10 in Paris, and I was in Belgrade for a while. To me now they are just airports. Cities are humiliating places to live, particularly in this part of the world.

In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie.

OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks.

Everything must be sold! Everything must be for sale! Everyone must buy! Everyone must have a Jeep!

What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world. Why don't I see a Frank Capra today? Because people aren't like this anymore? People haven't changed that much in 60 years.

I'm fed up with democracy. In a democracy, people vote for the mayors. I wanted to build a city where I will choose the citizens.

My purpose is to make a movie to make you warm. To give you some heat. Now, this rational world has become a place where only what is cool is good. Do you cut the movie on the basis of the beat of modernity or the basis of the beat of your own heart?

Milosevic's fundamental mistake was that he thought there were 250 million Serbs, and that he didn't have a couple of nuclear bombs in his pocket.

[press conference for Promise Me This (2007) at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival] It's like a Japanese fairy tale: go into town, do something there and then come back to the countryside. It's a funny, short idea and I had wanted to do something more simple than usual but it ended up being much more complicated. I must say that this is the first movie from my nine features which came in under-budget and almost under-schedule. This is something very new for me and one of the reasons is perhaps the fact that my wife was the producer!

There are always motherfuckers queuing up to pull you down to earth. But we must fly occasionally; we all have to feel that joy or we are nothing.

What is the problem with you, English? You killed millions of Indians and Africans, and yet you go nuts about the circumstances of the death of a single Serbian pigeon. I am touched you hold the lives of Serbian birds so dear, but you are crazy. I will never understand how your minds work.