Alejandro Jodorowsky Quotations

In order to be something, you must do something.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.

We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture.

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 always think that art is a form of sacrifice.

'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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I am like the rain, I go where I'm needed,

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

To be an artist, you need to play inside your work.

I wanted to be loved by my father. I could do anything to be loved by my father.

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

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

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.

A man doesn't cry. In my life, I've never cried. I cannot do it. I am a man. How will I cry?

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

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

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

In movies, images cost - if you want a big image, it takes more money.

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.

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

To have hands, to have fingers, is weird. Real life is weird, to have fingers?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

My consciousness is without limits more than when I was 40 or 50.

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

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

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 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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A true artist is always out of his time.

For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don't do it. But myself, I say: "To fail is only to see the way to fail."

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

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.

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 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 don't see myself as a moviemaker only, you know? When I can do a picture, I do. But I don't work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live.

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

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

Accepting death is a massive problem for everybody.