To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States - black people didn't have the right to vote.

The mirror is the tool of the one who wants to do a self-portrait. And if you want to make a photo you need a mirror.

I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.

I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.

It's interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves - not so much to learn about me.

I don't believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue ... It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.

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.