Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

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.

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

Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.

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

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.

One must confront vague ideas with clear images.

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)

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.

My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.

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

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

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

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.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second.

When sex gets problematic, the totalitarianist walks in.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.