Top 86 Jean-Luc Godard Quotes
#1. What is your greatest ambition in life?'
'To become immortal ... and then die.
Jean-Luc Godard
#2. When sex gets problematic, the totalitarianist walks in.
Jean-Luc Godard
#5. Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.
Jean-Luc Godard
#6. To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard
#8. Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.
Jean-Luc Godard
#9. When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
Jean-Luc Godard
#10. Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others.
Jean-Luc Godard
#11. One might almost say that to live in society today is something like living inside an enormous comic strip.
Jean-Luc Godard
#12. Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
Jean-Luc Godard
#13. 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.
Jean-Luc Godard
#15. Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
Jean-Luc Godard
#17. There are no more simple images ... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images ...
Jean-Luc Godard
#18. Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.
Jean-Luc Godard
#19. I've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.
Jean-Luc Godard
#21. If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.
Jean-Luc Godard
#22. There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.
Jean-Luc Godard
#23. Cinema is capitalism in its purest form ... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard
#24. I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.
Jean-Luc Godard
#25. 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!
Jean-Luc Godard
#26. I believe what Jesus said, but Jesus never said priests couldn't be fools.
Jean-Luc Godard
#29. Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)
Jean-Luc Godard
#30. Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.
Jean-Luc Godard
#32. Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie,
Jean-Luc Godard
#33. Good films get smaller audiences, but more of the viewer.
Jean-Luc Godard
#34. People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me
Jean-Luc Godard
#35. He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
Jean-Luc Godard
#36. Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.
Jean-Luc Godard
#38. When you go to the cinema you look up, when you watch television you look down.
Jean-Luc Godard
#41. 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.
Jean-Luc Godard
#42. Patricia: Do you know William Faulkner?
Michel: No. Who's he? Have you slept with him?
Jean-Luc Godard
#43. I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.
Jean-Luc Godard
#44. The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.
Jean-Luc Godard
#46. 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.
Jean-Luc Godard
#47. A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
Jean-Luc Godard
#49. Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.
Jean-Luc Godard
#50. Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.
Jean-Luc Godard
#51. Humane people don't start revolutions, they start libraries. And cemeteries.
Jean-Luc Godard
#53. I don't know if I am free because I am happy or happy because I am free.
Jean-Luc Godard
#54. First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we're entering the Age of the Ass.
Jean-Luc Godard
#56. Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.
Jean-Luc Godard
#58. 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.
Jean-Luc Godard
#62. Communism existed once, during two 45 minute half-times, when Honved, from Budapest, won over England by 6-3. The English played individually, and the Hungarians, collectively.
Jean-Luc Godard
#64. Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Jean-Luc Godard
#65. 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.
Jean-Luc Godard
#67. The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
Jean-Luc Godard
#68. It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to.
Jean-Luc Godard
#69. People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.
Jean-Luc Godard
#70. Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.
Jean-Luc Godard
#72. 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.
Jean-Luc Godard
#73. We once believed we were auteurs but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
Jean-Luc Godard
#74. One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
Jean-Luc Godard
#75. Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That's why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society.
Jean-Luc Godard
#76. When you photograph a face ... you photograph the soul behind it.
Jean-Luc Godard
#78. I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.
Jean-Luc Godard
#79. 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.
Jean-Luc Godard
#80. I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.
Jean-Luc Godard
#81. Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?
Jean-Luc Godard
#82. People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'
Jean-Luc Godard
#83. I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
Jean-Luc Godard
#84. If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.
Jean-Luc Godard
#85. To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.
Jean-Luc Godard
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