Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

I believe what Jesus said, but Jesus never said priests couldn't be fools.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

I write and film history; I don't make it.

There is no light in electronincs. There is lightening. But lightening is not real light.

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

Photography is truth.

There are two kinds of homeland: one that is given is like a negative, and one that you have to conquer is like the positive.

Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.

We are losing our own capacity because we are poisoned in one way or another.

I know that I am old, because even if I think I'm younger than everyone - but that's true - my way of hoping and continuing is that I am always in a younger position than the other one.

What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.

I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.

ALPHA-60: Your name is written "Ivan Johnson," but it is pronounced "Lemmy Caution," Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville. CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call "normal." ... ALPHA-60: You cannot escape. The door is locked. CAUTION: Try to stop me, pal.

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.

You can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun

Action can make you laugh. But just because you are glad. Even if there is no meaning.

Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.

The observer and the universe are part of the same universe. It's what science discovered at the beginning of this century, when they say you can't tell where an atomic particle is. You know where they are, but not their speed; or you know their speed but not their place, because it depends on you. The one who describes is part of the description.

I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.

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

The silent film, it was cut at the age of thirty.

To be immortal and then die

"Away, away," says hate. "Closer, closer," says love.

There are no more simple images... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images.

I have no desire to vote for French politicians, and I'm not entitled to vote in Switzerland.

I learned from Rossellini that you are rich even if you have a little money.

My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.

The fact is that, unless you are very good, most first movies are too long, and you lose your rhythm and your audience over two or three hours.

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.

On TV you can't show landscapes. You just can't. Even a postcard is better.

Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.

The world isn't a sad place, it's just big.

I think laughter comes because things are hardly working.

Now at my age I understand how sad it must have been for some directors or actors at the time the talkies began. Because, really, a whole continent disappeared.

The projector will soon disappear. The camera, not really. OK, it depends... it depends on change.

I am nowhere. You can call me the man in the middle.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Movies will continue one way or another. Maybe on video. Even on video games. You have to look at it, if you have children, or if you are linked to children, because it's new for them. This has not disappeared; the look of a child who is discovering the world, whatever it is.

There is no more discovery. Not since the beginning of this century. There are new gadgets. New important gadgets.

I think I'm innocently representing a certain belief in motion pictures, and, well OK.

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

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.

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.