Alejandro Jodorowsky quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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!

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Life is beautiful, what do you think? In the morning I say, 'Ah, I am alive still!' All my friends die already. I am alive. It is fantastic.

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

  • The planet is ill, everyone knows that. But I need to be optimistic, otherwise I would just be adding to the negativity. So every night I come on Madrid TV and read a piece of good news.

  • For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • In Mexico, when we want to speak deep secrets, we drink pulgue together. It is a drink made from the cactus plant, and when you take the bottle from your mouth, it leaves a string behind, between the mouth and the bottle, like a spider's web. It shows that the truth sticks inside.

  • 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.

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

  • We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.

  • Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.

  • I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.

  • Let the inner god that is in each one of us speak. The temple is your body, and the priest is your heart: it is from here that every awareness must begin.

  • I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.

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

  • My ideal audience is on the young side, eager to mutate and move to a higher level of consciousness. I want my images to turn the viewer's brain into what it is: a flying carpet.

  • I felt so alone as a boy because no one wanted to be friends with me.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

  • If you are great, 'El Topo' is a great picture. If you are limited, 'El Topo' is limited.

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • For me 'Dune' was a dream - a big dream!

  • 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.

  • 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 always think that art is a form of sacrifice.

  • I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.

  • All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.

  • I don't have interest in life. Life has an interest in me.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • What's important is to give your ideas to the world if you love the world.

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

  • Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

  • 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.

  • In order to be something, you must do something.

  • I am old, but I feel very beautiful.

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

  • 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 don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.

  • Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

  • My writing routine is everyday I put a record on, the same one since 20 years. Then I burn a stick of incense, I put perfume here on the insides of my soles, I paint my left testicle red, and I write.

  • I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating,

  • 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.

  • I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I dont 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; its from another century, its not for today.

  • A true artist is always out of his time.

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

  • The tarot is sacred.

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

  • The end of the surrealism movement was so political, so artistically pure.

  • For me, surrealism is in my blood; it's not an effort.

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

  • We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.

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

  • 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.

  • I had a big problem working with stars, because they are too expensive and have too many demands. Their names help you raise the money to make the movie, but then they demand close-ups. They change things. You end up doing things at their service instead of servicing the film.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.

  • People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.

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

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

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

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

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

  • George Harrison wanted to play the thief in 'Holy Mountain.'

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I like Hollywood movies. I like them like I like to eat scrambled eggs; I like them for fun.

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

  • Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.

  • 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.

  • Accepting death is a massive problem for everybody.

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

  • 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!'

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

  • When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair.

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

  • I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

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

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

  • Failure doesn't mean anything, it just means changing paths.

  • I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.

  • The apocalypse is now! Americans know this, that the only hope is the flying saucers. Do you know how I see the world? Like a person who is dying. It's a worm who is dying to make a butterfly. We must not stop the worm from dying, we must help the worm to die to help the butterfly to be born. We need to dance with death. This world is dying, but very well. We will make a big, big enormous butterfly. You and I will be the first movements in the wings of the butterfly because we are speaking like this.

  • Maybe if literature was prohibited the same way as cocaine, people out of pure curiosity would try to get a couple of lines

  • Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don't ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it!

  • One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.

  • Every mind has another vision of reality. There is not a common reality. Every person thinks he is like the others, but every person is different, living in his own psychology.

  • What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.

  • Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.

  • One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.

  • The only thing a master can teach is how to learn about yourself. There are no secrets. They are only techniques to waken yourself.

  • You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.

  • For art to be art it has to cure.

  • The imagination wants to construct the new worlds, no? Creativity is a solution. If I ask you, "What is your goal in life? How many years do you have to live before to die? How many years do you have? And what you will do with these years you have?" You have pressure there. "How you will realize a good life? How? Tell me!" Then, you start to open your mind.

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

  • For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.

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