Jean-Luc Godard Quotes
A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
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.'
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.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
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.
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?
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)
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
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 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.
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.
Hollywood was invented by hoodlums from central Europe. And today a Hollywood lawyer is not a hoodlum. He's a bureaucrat.
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.
I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.
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.
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.
There are no more simple images... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images.
Through most of my career I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.
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.
