Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

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.

The world isn't a sad place, it's just big.

What I like in pictures whether by an old director or a young director is when I have the feeling he or she is really using the capacity of film.

Words and action in movies are the spirit or the mind. And these days the body is almost completely forgotten. In the beginning the body - nature - was more part of the action.

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.

Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.

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?

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

There is no light in electronincs. There is lightening. But lightening is not real light.

In movies, comedy and tragedy are all the same.

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

Photography is truth.

Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.

There is a new world coming and this new world is very rude.

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

Living, it can be sad too.

I never read Karl Marx.

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

Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.

The average income in France is $1,000 a month, and you can't live decently on that.

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

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

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.

To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.

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

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've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

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.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

You can be with other people, which is ideal, or you can be alone.

The projector will soon disappear. The camera, not really. OK, it depends... it depends on change.

Movies are a world of Fragments.

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

This new world which is being born is cynical and amnesiac. And it has eliminated perspective.

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

There are two kinds of homeland: one that is given is like a negative, and one that you have to conquer is like the positive.

You can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

When you are out in the land, OK, you have the land but you are alone with it. And sometimes it is too much.

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.

All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun

When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well.

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

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

To be immortal and then die

I like both slapstick and contradiction. Like philosophers.

We are all older and more tired.

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

There is no more discovery. Not since the beginning of this century. There are new gadgets. New important gadgets.