Jean-Luc Godard Quotations

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

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

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.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.

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.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

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.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

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

I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.

Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 observer and the universe are part of the same universe. It's what science discovered at the beginning of this century, when they say you can't tell where an atomic particle is. You know where they are, but not their speed; or you know their speed but not their place, because it depends on you. The one who describes is part of the description.

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

To be immortal and then die

I make film to make time pass.

Movies are a world of Fragments.

Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.

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)

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

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

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.

To become immortal, and then to die.

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.

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

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.

Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.

My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.

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

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

A critic is a soldier that fires on his own men.

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

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

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

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

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

Photography is truth.

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

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

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

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

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.

ALPHA-60: Your name is written "Ivan Johnson," but it is pronounced "Lemmy Caution," Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville. CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call "normal." ... ALPHA-60: You cannot escape. The door is locked. CAUTION: Try to stop me, pal.

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

There are no more simple images... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images...

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second

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

One must confront vague ideas with clear images,

When sex gets problematic, the totalitarianist walks in.

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.

I don't know if I am free because I am happy or happy because I am free.

Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

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?

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.

It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to.

What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.

To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

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.

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.

"Away, away," says hate. "Closer, closer," says love.

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

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'