"I'm an artist…and I'm part of every decision in a movie. This is not how they work in Hollywood. There, the director is part of the crew, not the main creator. I'm too old to change now. I wouldn't know how to do it."

"For me today, the most important filmmaker alive, for me personally is Pedro Almodóvar. Because he takes people on the fringes of society and they are bizarre. And If you read about them in the newspapers, you would think they were criminals. But in an Almodóvar film, you forgive them and you even learn to love them, which I think is closer to godliness, than making a film about good people running around."

"But it’s one of my worries, I can’t get over it in my mind. I mean, I can’t even reconcile myself to the fact that death is real. Plus I’m an atheist, so I have no belief in the afterlife and no creed to help me out. I see the whole thing as unnatural, I know that sounds odd.” He snorts. “So yes, I’m definitely afraid of dying."

"I've had a very good relationship with my mother, but there's a whole generation of Spanish women who have struggled: very strong fighting figures who carry their families. These women are now in their 80s and feel that life has been unfair to them; they don't know how to grow old and how to be happy old ladies."

"In fact I was never the son my parents wanted. I mean, I think that they really loved me. But it’s something I realised from a very young age."

"I rely on it, it’s an addiction, the need to tell stories. If anything, my relationship with film has become more tense, more of a problem, because there is always that question: when will my time be up? Will this be the last film I make?...Perhaps this is the reason I haven’t developed any other facets of my life. Quite the opposite, I think I’ve cut back. So I’ve now reached the point where film is the only thing that makes me feel whole. Cinema is the only thing I have. It’s finished up being both the end and the means for me."

"Whenever I've shot my previous films, I've felt phantoms of my own cinema past and personal past hovering over me. They accompanied me through those films. But this time I felt completely on my own. For the first time this film did not go hand-in-hand with my memories. The tone is different as well. It's very austere."

"I make fiction films because I like representation. That’s why I don’t make documentaries, and I don’t think I’ll ever make documentaries. The colors of my movies are not completely real, because I like that distance, that this is a movie, and reality is over there. I don’t want to make something that looks completely real. I want a representation of that. And this is what was appealing to me and why I started making movies."

"I’m single and my entire youth was spent enjoying time with friends, but these times I’m trying to be more responsible and take more care and use my energy in cinema. It makes me happier."

"You know in childhood it is difficult to be different. I spent long times in hospitals and it was complicated, but it made me know how strong I can be, and it helped me to get my wills. A long time ago I started to shoot my little short with my own cam with friends, but in 2005 came my first professional work. I visited an FX make up workshop and took a look at what else the teacher was doing outside of classes. He was working for movies and then I offered myself for work and have them take benefit of my peculiar body."

"The only real formula for real success is Work and Faith. All may achieve this sort of success for all may work and the only happiness, the only success, is in labor. Other rewards do not count, comparatively. The joy of leisure is an illusion. The chief reason for my liking serials for as long as I did was because they kept me constantly at work, whereas feature pictures do permit of a week or more idleness in between."

"When the Statue of Liberty emerged from the mists I gazed at it with an awe close to the sublime. It seemed to me to be the embodiment of all the beauty and magnificence with which I had invested America in my dreams. I had been a little bit afraid that America wouldn't be what I had dreamed--and here was a dream come triumphantly true."

"Bourgays are the doom of queer revolution."

"Inside any vigorexic queen, any muscle queen, any macho queen, any aloof queen, any of us, ultra-masculine gays, there's a flaming faggot fighting to come out. When we finally let her blossom, she'll be so busy chatting with the other internalized flaming faggots, that we'll finally be able to sexually enjoy the boring sexual macho that we all also carry inside us. Versatility, darlings, that's the recipe for success in bed (well, having a bed can also help)."

"There are two moments in the life of any fag that you can never forget: your first kiss with another man and your first argument with a heterosexual friend that doesn't get the difference between being a homosexual and wanting to be a woman. On first sight I can't calibrate which will be repeated more times during our sexually emancipated lifetime. Lucky enough, I can tell which we all prefer to be repeated: the argument with the heterosexual friend... if it ends in a long , wet, passionate kiss."

"I suppose not many people dress up with insults to go out. We, the homosexuals, have no other choice. Insults are for us almost an epistemological variable: we have learned to know our fellow beings -for, as much as it surprises us, they are our fellow beings- through their insults, and they, on the other hand, have learned to know us in spite of the exhausting job -a hard duty impossed by society- of insulting us."

"This pioneer of sexology [Krafft-Ebing] even came to question whether homosexuality might be innate (and people began to forgive us for living, as if it would matter to anyone if being an Atlético de Madrid fan was innate or not.)"

"Now then, I hasten to repeat that these practices [S&M] are certainly not usual or universal among us, but rather are variants practiced by a minority that is not representative of all gay people, although they do make up an identifiable sector that I don't want to leave out (as do many politically correct gay people, who like to give the impression that gay men only sodomize each other on Versace cushions by candlelights to Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach's Suites for Cello.)"

"I hate being referred to as a comedian. Being a homosexual and a comedian is like being a pig and P.R. of the slaughterhouse: absurd. I'd rather consider myself a satirist. According to Thesaurus: a humorist who uses ridicule and irony and sarcasm... but i also puke a lot in the face of frustration; so then again i must be a supermodel."