It isn't easy to understand the lives of people different from your own.

When I see a good film, it's like a whiplash. I run away, in order not to be influenced. Thus, the films I liked most are those I think least about.

Life should be taken ironically; otherwise, it becomes a tragedy.

I dislike judging myself, but I will say I would be wealthy today if I had accepted all the films that have been offered to me with large sums of money. But I've always refused, in order to do what I felt like doing.

I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.

The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.