Emir Kusturica Quotes

Emir Kusturica offers a wild, rebellious ride through history and imagination, ideal for readers craving unapologetic freedom.

21 quotes

1. That is a Medieval way of drawing history, in which they do not respect the law and want the rest of the world to respect the law. That's not possible.

2. I just don't get it. The pigeon was already dead, we found it in the road. And no other censor has objected. What is the problem with you English? You killed millions of Indians and Africans, and yet you go nuts about the circumstances of the death of a single Serbian pigeon. I am touched you hold the lives of Serbian birds so dear, but you are crazy. I will never understand how your minds work.

3. In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that a western pile of shit is actually pie.

4. My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks.

5. There are always motherfuckers queuing up to pull you down to earth. But we must fly occasionally, we all have to feel that joy or we are nothing.

6. the man stands between life and death. the man thinks...

7. the fish is mute. expressionless. the fish doesn't think, because the fish knows everything. the fish knows everything.

8. I am a man with a lot of passion.

9. I will not cut my film because, because, because, because of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

10. Yugoslavia was a kind of superpower. Great movies. Beautiful novels. Great rock-and-roll. We became a superpower in basketball. The problem is that people needed to identify more strongly with it after Tito and his awful, tricky way of leading the country.

11. My relationship with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is very clear: respect. We met a couple of times; once I received a medal from him. I respect hugely how he brought Russia back from its knees.

12. I started moving towards Serbia when I felt my country, Yugoslavia, was being taken away from me. My feeling of nationality was not as strong as those around me who were attaching themselves to these absurd new entities.

13. I am somebody who respects Putin highly, but I'm not somebody who is against America.

14. When you make movies the way I do, you invest everything you have. And you do it like a crazy maniac.

15. At a certain moment, Yugoslavia stopped being rational, and then you end up going to war.

16. I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

17. Most people only remember Maradona for the bad parts now. But he was a genius, someone who lifted us and himself up to the level of the gods.

18. The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written.

19. 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.

20. You know, in each segment of ex-Yugoslavia, multi-ethnic life is lost, except I think we somehow still have this in Serbia.

21. Just because I believe in the identity and integrity of my country doesn't make a xenophobe or a nationalist.