Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

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

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!

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

Don't ever promise to adore me forever. Let's keep the feeling that this love of ours is a love without tomorow.

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

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

To be immortal and then die

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

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

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

Patricia: Do you know William Faulkner?
Michel: No. Who's he? Have you slept with him?

Art and theory of art, at one and the same time ; beauty and the secret of beauty ; cinema, and apologia for cinema. '
- Godard on Godard: Critical Writings

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

There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual

Communism existed once, during two 45 minute half-times, when Honved, from Budapest, won over England by 6-3. The English played individually, and the Hungarians, collectively.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

To become immortal, and then to die.

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

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

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.

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

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)

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.

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.

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

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.

One might almost say that to live in society today is something like living inside an enormous comic strip.

Change nothing so that everything will be different

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

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

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.

Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That's why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society.

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

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

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

One can enjoy existence, not life.

My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.

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.

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

Take a drawing by Matisse, a simple curve of a leg or a shoulder. Is there a basis, at the beginning when he starts drawing his curve? There isn't. This is what I'm trying to say. And that's what comprises the originality of Max Ophuls, which he acquired a little bit at a time, because in Liebelei, in Letter from an Unknown Woman, in his American films, it's not there. It's a freedom that is earned and that is found, that isn't applied. On a basic level, it's neither better nor worse as a way of making a film. But there's something extremely original that we found so satisfying back in the day and that continues to satisfy me now … There's a kind of pure cinema of that era – you might even call it experimental – which has disappeared. There's no literature…not that there's no text or dialogue, but there's no pre-literature.

(Jean-Luc Godard in conversation with Marcel Ophuls, 2002)

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

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

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.

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

Photography is truth.