Film lovers are sick people.

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.

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

Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance.

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.

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

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