If God gives you chocolate, you open your mouth, no?
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Surrealism was necessary – essential, even – in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early ’60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Life is beautiful, what do you think? In the morning I say, ‘Ah, I am alive still!’ All my friends die already. I am alive. It is fantastic.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Scientific thought and the miraculous unconscious are two waves in the same ocean.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I don’t believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too old now; it’s from another century, it’s not for today.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I hated Peter O’Toole. I wanted to kill that guy! When they said he was dead, I was happy. People said, ‘Poor Peter O’Toole.’ I was happy!
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am like the rain: I go where I’m needed.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

My ego every day is more and more polite. I tame it.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

We are all working for the immortality of the human consciousness.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

My wife is 37 years younger than me. I don’t feel the difference.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I don’t regret any past. I am not there. I am not sorry not to make pictures, because I know one day I will do it. I intend to live 150 years.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

My consciousness is without limits more than when I was 40 or 50.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I don’t see myself as a moviemaker only, you know? When I can do a picture, I do. But I don’t work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures… I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.
Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It’s coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.
Alejandro Jodorowsky