Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

When you go to the cinema you look up, when you watch television you look down.

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

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

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.

American pictures usually have no subject, only a story. A pretty woman is not a subject. Julia Roberts doing this and that is not a subject.

To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.

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!

...the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera.

I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

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.

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.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

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

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

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.

“Away, away,” says hate. “Closer, closer,” says love.

It would mean little enough to say that Bitter Victory is the Goethian of films.

Marianne: That's what makes me so sad, life is so different from books.