If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

I don't watch my own films. There is little time; I'd rather see another film.

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling.

I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.

I think I did fifteen long features and fifteen documentaries, or something like this, which is very little when you think of people making a film every year. Some people have done fifty or sixty films.