49 Quotes by Emir Kusturica

Making movies is a dangerous job. Because you are always the one who stands at the center of the universe when making movies.

In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernize, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things.

I am finished with cities. I spent four years in New York, ten in Paris, and I was in Belgrade for a while. To me now they are just airports.

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.

I am a living illustration of Bosnian mixing and converting. My grandparents lived in eastern Herzegovina. Very poor. The Turks came and brought Islam. There were three brothers in the family. One was Orthodox Christian. The other two took Islam to survive.

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?

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.

I’ve been around some very famous people, but no one has the effect Maradona has; people tremble in his presence.

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.