There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

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.

All our thinking constitutes the new world, but all our thoughts are older and older.

When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well.

I've decided that what interests me most is that you can only capture the light at a certain time. But after that, five minutes after that, then it's a different thing. So if you don't have the right aperture, you've missed it. Of course, you can correct it in the lab. But not really.

I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.