Jean-Luc Godard quotes:

I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.

People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.

American pictures usually have no subject, only a story. A pretty woman is not a subject. Julia Roberts doing this and that is not a subject.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.

I make film to make time pass.

ALPHA-60: Your name is written "Ivan Johnson," but it is pronounced "Lemmy Caution," Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville. CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call "normal." ... ALPHA-60: You cannot escape. The door is locked. CAUTION: Try to stop me, pal.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

We once believed we were auteurs but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.

There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.

What I like in pictures whether by an old director or a young director is when I have the feeling he or she is really using the capacity of film.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

Every edit is a lie.

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

I like both slapstick and contradiction. Like philosophers.

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.

"Away, away," says hate. "Closer, closer," says love.

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!

Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.

The tree or the road - the ones I know of, finally they are the only characters I know really. The human characters I don't know. So there is both something I know and something I don't know. And I put them together.

Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)

If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.

When the film stock disappears, the matter - because movies are matter - (disappears). The laws of this have been established by Newton, Einstein, and others: there is a correspondence between light and matter, and light is matter. And energy.

In Europe, the houses and the apartments are getting smaller. So there is no need to increase the screen because the apartment is becoming smaller.

Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.

Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.

To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.

I've always said that to make movies, to make images and sound, is possible by one way or another. And it has not to be ruled by the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Pharaohs from Hollywood or wherever. I have tried very hard to make even a small budget picture here. It always fails. Over a dozen times. And now I know why. It was only because I wanted to be in control of the money. To spend it the way I wanted.

The way we have done pictures has to be disappeared.

Cinema is movement, after all.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second

The trouble with Hollywood is that it has poisoned us. If you see a poster of a movie it is mainly the picture of a woman and a man. Always a love story. Yes. But it shouldn't be that way. It should be another (way).

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

When sex gets problematic, the totalitarianist walks in.

I never read Karl Marx.

The silent film, it was cut at the age of thirty.

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.

I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.

the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera.

Something that I like in movies, and I dislike too, is that they can't be projected well.

One must confront vague ideas with clear images,

I think I'm innocently representing a certain belief in motion pictures, and, well OK.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

Living, it can be sad too.

Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.

Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we're entering the Age of the Ass.

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.

Even with a small video we will always be able to do a small movie with friends and to show it to someone. You won't get the Oscar for it. But, after all, why are you writing and why are you filming?

Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.

I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.

I learned from Rossellini that you are rich even if you have a little money.

I don't know if I am free because I am happy or happy because I am free.

Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.

When I have a low budget I always try to make it a lesson in economy.

There are no more simple images... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images...

A critic is a soldier that fires on his own men.

You can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.

i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

It makes me laugh when you bring two things together which have nothing to do with one another.

Photography is truth.

The world isn't a sad place, it's just big.

When you go to the cinema you look up, when you watch television you look down.

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

In movies, comedy and tragedy are all the same.

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.

To become immortal, and then to die.

I think laughter comes because things are hardly working.

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

The observer and the universe are part of the same universe. It's what science discovered at the beginning of this century, when they say you can't tell where an atomic particle is. You know where they are, but not their speed; or you know their speed but not their place, because it depends on you. The one who describes is part of the description.

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.

(Landscapes) are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me

Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.

Through most of my career I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.

To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.

We are losing our own capacity because we are poisoned in one way or another.

Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie,

To be immortal and then die

Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others.

My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.

Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.

All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun

I believe what Jesus said, but Jesus never said priests couldn't be fools.

You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.

The fact is that, unless you are very good, most first movies are too long, and you lose your rhythm and your audience over two or three hours.

Movies are a world of Fragments.

If you have made three or four films, my feeling is, he is older than me because I am still making my first movie. That helps me.

Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.

You can be with other people, which is ideal, or you can be alone.

Movies will continue one way or another. Maybe on video. Even on video games. You have to look at it, if you have children, or if you are linked to children, because it's new for them. This has not disappeared; the look of a child who is discovering the world, whatever it is.

We are all older and more tired.

The average income in France is $1,000 a month, and you can't live decently on that.

I'm Franco-Swiss. I've always been shuttling between these two worlds, never firmly planted in either one.

Cinema teaches us about the human body and how we look at things.