Film Quotes by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of…

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, Im…

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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…

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as…

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

People often criticize my films for being pessimistic; there are certainly many reasons for being pessimistic but I don’t see my films that way.…

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Women think in [Douglas] Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing…

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films…

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but…

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The Jews have never been ashamed of being Jews, whereas homosexuals have been stupid enough to be ashamed of their homosexuality.

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable - they should be taken absolutely seriously.

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

— Rainer Werner Fassbinder