Rainer Werner Fassbinder Quotes

#1. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#2. The Jews have never been ashamed of being Jews, whereas homosexuals have been stupid enough to be ashamed of their homosexuality.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#3. And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable - they should be taken absolutely seriously.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#4. I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#5. Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#6. In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#7. People are terrible. They can bear anything. Anything! People are hard and brutal. And everyone is disposable. Everyone! That's the lesson.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#8. The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#9. For all of us it's the things that won't work that keep our interest.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#10. Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#11. It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful ... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#12. Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but what I've learned from his work.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#13. Better a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany!

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#14. The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a German film.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#15. I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#16. As long as movies are depressing, life isn't.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#17. I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder