Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.
When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.
There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors
Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.
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.
The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a movie theatre is to go down to the front and turn around, and look at all the uplifted faces, the light from the screen reflected upon them.
Life has more imagination than we do.
The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.
In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.
Film lovers are sick people.
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.
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.
The man who thinks he can do without the world is indeed mistaken; but the man who thinks the world cannot do without him is mistaken even worse.
When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.
Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.
We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.
Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.
The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has.
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.
I am often asked at what point in my love affair with films I began to want to be a director or a critic. Truthfully, I don't know. All I know is that I wanted to get closer and closer to films.
Is the cinema more important than life?
Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.
I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.
I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.
