Best 115 quotes of Jean-luc Godard on MyQuotes

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

Action can make you laugh. But just because you are glad. Even if there is no meaning.

All our thinking constitutes the new world, but all our thoughts are older and older.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Cinema is movement, after all.

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

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

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

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.

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?

Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.

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

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

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

Hollywood was invented by hoodlums from central Europe. And today a Hollywood lawyer is not a hoodlum. He's a bureaucrat.

I am nowhere. You can call me the man in the middle.

I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.

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

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.

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.

If we think today the way TV is ordering us to think, we think of Einstein as someone modern. Stravinsky is modern music, but it came at the time of Birth of a Nation, which is an old movie.

If you have $300,000 to shoot a cigarette on a table, it's an enormous amount of money. Maybe that's why my movies are the way they are. But it's the only way I can make a living.

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.

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.

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.

I have a large number of cassettes, but I look at them mainly for reference purposes.

I have no desire to vote for French politicians, and I'm not entitled to vote in Switzerland.

I know that I am old, because even if I think I'm younger than everyone - but that's true - my way of hoping and continuing is that I am always in a younger position than the other one.

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.

I make film to make time pass.

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

I'm satisfied to have an ordinary success and an ordinary life and an ordinary income. Later, I don't know.

I'm very interested in tennis, but when I try to tell younger players about [Bill] Tilden, they're not interested.

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.

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!

In movies, comedy and tragedy are all the same.

In the beginning there was not even talking. In movies, there was no need for that. Because it was more evident if there was no talking. Only in sports does there remain this fervor, which can even become violent. There's this desire to see something big.

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

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

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

I've always considered the French-speaking part of Switzerland as a province of France.

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.

I've decided that what interests me most is that you can only capture the light at a certain time. But after that, five minutes after that, then it's a different thing. So if you don't have the right aperture, you've missed it. Of course, you can correct it in the lab. But not really.