Michael Haneke Quotes

They're reacting and that's wonderful. It's better than them sitting there doing nothing. I say make them react - do whatever's in your power to move the audience, and if that's where it is, and there where it is with America, sex and violence, then I say project it.

I recommend a little dose of cancer to anyone.

I need my comedy to offend. That's my personal views.

I love saying terrible things. Things that I think are terrible and I've gotten in to trouble in the past - just hearing it come out of my mouth or seeing it typed and seeing it out there - something terrible that in real life isn't funny.

Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy - the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

Marilyn Manson is a criticism of gimmickry, while being itself a gimmick.

We tried to make a movie that had sex and violence because we like sex and violence.

Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.

I try to make myself, and subsequently the audience, as uncomfortable as possible, whether it's completely desecrating a song they thought was one thing, or getting too drunk to really do a very good job.

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

For me comedy and violence has a lot in common. Just as you expect, comedy always lurks behind the most unexpected of circumstances.

I've been on shows that go for shock value.

I will concede to you one thing - 'Hustler' is offensive, even to the point of being iconoclastic. That's our purpose - to be offensive.

People need to be peppered or even outraged occasionally. Our national comedy and drama is packed with earthy familiarity and honest vulgarity. Clean vulgarity can be very shocking and that, in my view, gives greater involvement.

'The Scarlet Gospels' does, by general consensus, seem to mark a new high - or low, depending on your point of view - in its excessiveness, in its extremities.

I like antagonizing the audience, poking at them.

I love Cillian Murphy's character in 'Peaky Blinders' and Tom Hardy's in 'Taboo' - theses are characters that, as audience members, we follow along with and root for. But our own morality is tested throughout that journey, because these characters ride a thin line between morality and amorality.

With 'Only God Forgives,' what's great about that movie is it just freaked so many people out.

As comics if you aren't rubbing people the wrong way, to me, you suck.

Playing somebody who's obsessed. Playing somebody who is transgressing, and who is really crossing moral lines and ethical lines. That's always interesting.

A man bitten by a dog, whether the animal is mad or not, is apt to get mad himself.

There's only so many times you can kick a dog before it turns viscous. (Julian)

"How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder.

Would I rather the research lab that tests animals is reduced to a bunch of cinders? Yes.

So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do?