Emir Kusturica

“I'm not anti-American. I was raised to love both sides.”

“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...”

“I will always fight for peace. But, unfortunately, it is war that drives us forward. It is war that makes the major turns. It makes Wall Street function; it makes all the bastards in the Bal...”

“I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.”

“I am a living illustration of Bosnian mixing and converting. My grandparents lived in eastern Herzegovina. Very poor. The Turks came and brought Islam. There were three brothers in the famil...”

“If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'”

“I am not trying to say I'm a genius, but 'Underground' was the strongest attack there has been on Milosevic. It is about a man who locks his friends in a cellar for 40 years and convinces th...”

“Every time I'm shooting a movie I want to kill myself. Because I don't see the light in the end of the tunnel.”

“In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernize, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things.”

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

“I've been around some very famous people, but no one has the effect Maradona has; people tremble in his presence.”

“I'm just a troublemaker.”

“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 wi...”

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