Jean-Luc Godard

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

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.

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

More or less, I am always saying, 'Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.'

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.

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

Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.

A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.

Through most of my career, I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.

I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.

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.

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

One must confront vague ideas with clear images.

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

Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.

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.

One has to change one's life. Maybe this is easier for people who have nothing to do than for those who have something to do.

Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.

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.

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.

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.