Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

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

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

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.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

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.

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

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.

One must confront vague ideas with clear images.

In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!

To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.

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

Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.

Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.

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.

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

Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.