29 Quotes by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Better a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany!

Since I'm not a second Marx or Freud who can offer people alternatives, I have to let them keep their own wrong feelings. And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable-they should be taken absolutely seriously.

The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, Im convinced, bad ones, because they made people sick. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

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

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

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

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

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.

Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It's a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other.