Francois Truffaut Quotes

Hitchcock: Definitely, I think the most interesting women, sexually, are the English women. I feel that the English women, the Swedes, the northern Germans, and Scandinavians are a great deal more exciting than the Latin, the Italian, and the French women. Sex should not be advertised. An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into a cab with you and, to your surprise, she'll probably pull a man's pants open.

Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

I'd skip school regularly to see movies - even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early.

Suspense is simply the dramatization of a film's narrative, or if you will, the most intense presentation possible of dramatic situations.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors

I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.

At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that.

The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has.

Purely cinematic film ... actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.

Film lovers are sick people.

Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.

Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired all over the world. Young people who are just discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo, or through North by Northwest, may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this is far from being the case.

In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course, famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case.

His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film.
(...)
In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics' approach to Hitchcock.
That is what this book is all about.

Is the cinema more important than life?

A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking-it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.

The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.

But the cinephile is ... a neurotic! (That's not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it's because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, "When you love life, you go to the movies," it's false! It's exactly the opposite: when you don't love life, or when life doesn't give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.

Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.

Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.

The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film.

I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.

I never understood the meaning of a film. I am very concrete. I only understand what is on the screen. In my whole life, I have never understood a single symbol.

During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema.

There's no such thing as an anti-war film,

I am the happiest man in the world and here's why: I walk down a street and I see a woman, not tall but well-proportioned, very dark-haired, very neat in her dress, wearing a dark skirt with deep pleats that swing with the rhythm of her rather quick steps; her stockings, of dark color, are carefully, impeccably smooth; her face is not smiling, this woman walks down the street without trying to please, as if she were unconscious of what she represented: a good carnal image of woman, a physical image, more than a sexy image, a sexual image. --Francois Truffaut, "Is Truffaut the Happiest Man on Earth? Yes," 1970

judge: I think we should place your child under observation in a special home.
Gilberte Doinel: Could it be by the sea, Your Honor?
From The 400 Blows (1959)

Life has more imagination than we do.

When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.

What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation.