Robert Bresson

When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best - that is inspiration.

In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.

The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last penny into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.

Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

Laugh at a bad reputation. Fear a good one that you could not sustain.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.

Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc...) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create

Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.