Best 82 quotes of Agnes Varda on MyQuotes

An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - she almost doesn't recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We're the ones who are suffering. She's not.

At that time, when I started, in the '50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.

Gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It's just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer. Women have to make jokes about themselves, laugh about themselves, because they have nothing to lose.

I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure - stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

I'd been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that's part of being shy.

I didn't go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.

I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.

I didn't see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn't have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me. I started totally free and crazy and innocent. Now I've seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don't do commercials, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing.

I don't believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue ... It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.

I don't try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers. Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.

I don't watch my own films. There is little time; I'd rather see another film.

If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.

I had a very good time when I did The Gleaners - even though the people are poor, and I was suffering to see the conditions, and plus they are not such lovely hearts. They are tough to each other, they beat each other, they are rude and they are violent and they drink. They're not sweethearts, you know, but some were so interesting.

I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It's my white hair, and I put color there. My grandson says I'm punk.

I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words - this is a book!

I know people could tell incredible stories. People have been in concentration camps, or women being raped, or a man going to war and not recovering from it. People have been robbed and beaten. A lot of people have had strong events in their life, which I didn't.

I live in cinema. I feel I've lived here forever.

I made a braid because Chinese old people, they say that the God will take you by the hair to join you with - but God didn't take me, so I cut the braid.

I'm interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

I'm missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

I'm myself - knowing I'm doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I'm what I'm not.

I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.

I'm not nostalgic. My memories are back here in my mind.

I'm still fighting. I don't know how much longer, but I'm still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

I'm trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

I never fought, I never learned kung fu or boxing, I never went into these sportif competitions. I wouldn't cross the ocean. I think it's ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do. I did not think that woman would be restrained. I never saw that, especially not in filmmaking, where you don't have to be strong.

I never met Publo Picasso. I took pictures at the Festival d'Avignon, but I was too shy to ask to go in his studio. It does not look like me now, but I was very shy, and shy of men also. I think there was a world that frightened me totally.

In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don't want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.

I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don't even want to meet them or see them.

I see all these students, and I admire them - they're trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I'm sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was - that's the way I was - autodidact.

I should say nothing! I'm through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time.

I think I did fifteen long features and fifteen documentaries, or something like this, which is very little when you think of people making a film every year. Some people have done fifty or sixty films.

I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.

I think people should be different. I love people who don't go by the rule that you have to be careful because you're old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that.

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family.

I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.

I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time.

I try to do nothing. I drink rosemary when I have a lot of work to do. People take coffee, they take speed, whatever. I take rosemary.

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen.

It's a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

It's interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves - not so much to learn about me.

It's nice to think that we have in ourselves the energy. It's somewhere, but it's sleeping sometimes. I try to wake it up when I need it.

It's peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families.

I've always been like this - trying to find adventure where it's still in its first élan - the first spring.

I've changed my approach to people and to filming because of the new equipment, which is important.

I've seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don't do commercials, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing.

I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn't do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working.