Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

I make film to make time pass.

I think laughter comes because things are hardly working.

Now at my age I understand how sad it must have been for some directors or actors at the time the talkies began. Because, really, a whole continent disappeared.

When I go in front of the light - go towards it - it is because it brings me energy. That's all.

I know that I am old, because even if I think I'm younger than everyone - but that's true - my way of hoping and continuing is that I am always in a younger position than the other one.

When I have a low budget I always try to make it a lesson in economy.

I write and film history; I don't make it.

The way we have done pictures has to be disappeared.

If we think today the way TV is ordering us to think, we think of Einstein as someone modern. Stravinsky is modern music, but it came at the time of Birth of a Nation, which is an old movie.

Because my movies are not successful, they are not shown. So I make a living from the budget.

When you go to the cinema you look up, when you watch television you look down.

Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others.

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

I've always considered the French-speaking part of Switzerland as a province of France.

The fact is that, unless you are very good, most first movies are too long, and you lose your rhythm and your audience over two or three hours.

I'm Franco-Swiss. I've always been shuttling between these two worlds, never firmly planted in either one.

If I'm speaking it means that in one way or another when I say, "I'm cold" it belongs to me: I'm cold. But just by saying this it becomes general.

There is a problem in pretending I can still control my destiny in the commercial market.

We are losing our own capacity because we are poisoned in one way or another.

I'm very interested in tennis, but when I try to tell younger players about [Bill] Tilden, they're not interested.

TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission.

(Landscapes) are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

On TV you can't show landscapes. You just can't. Even a postcard is better.

I'm satisfied to have an ordinary success and an ordinary life and an ordinary income. Later, I don't know.

Action can make you laugh. But just because you are glad. Even if there is no meaning.

If you have made three or four films, my feeling is, he is older than me because I am still making my first movie. That helps me.

The silent film, it was cut at the age of thirty.

Something that I like in movies, and I dislike too, is that they can't be projected well.

One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.

When there's 100 people around you can't really forget yourself.

I don't like Paris or being in big cities.

To become immortal, and then to die.

People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me

Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.

I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second

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