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

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.

I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.

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

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

An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal - falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.

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.