Francois Truffaut Quotes

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.

An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal - falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.

All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance.

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.

There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors

When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.

But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a movie theatre is to go down to the front and turn around, and look at all the uplifted faces, the light from the screen reflected upon them.

Film lovers are sick people.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.

Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

The man who thinks he can do without the world is indeed mistaken; but the man who thinks the world cannot do without him is mistaken even worse.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.

The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.

Life has more imagination than we do.

I am often asked at what point in my love affair with films I began to want to be a director or a critic. Truthfully, I don't know. All I know is that I wanted to get closer and closer to films.

I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.

Is the cinema more important than life?

I've always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job.

Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.

Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.

There's no such thing as an anti-war film.

I'd skip school regularly to see movies - even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early.

We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.

During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema.

The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has.

Purely cinematic film ... actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.

Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance.

At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that.

I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.

I prefer to be busy all day long, and when you work for someone else, you're not busy enough.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation.

Airing one's dirty linen never makes for a masterpiece.

A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking-it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.