Truffaut Quotes

#1. I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.

Suzan-Lori Parks

#2. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#3. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#4. Film lovers are sick people.

Francois Truffaut

#5. It wasn't my childhood fantasy to work with Truffaut or be in obscure films. I like Midnight Run better than I like The Bicycle Thief. It was films like Die Hard and Bladerunner that made me want to be an actor.

Ben Affleck

#6. What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

Bernardo Bertolucci

#7. I've always felt that, although Truffaut was greatly revered and admired, at the same time, in terms of film and how much he loved film, he was underestimated.

Nicolas Roeg

#8. With horror stories in general, I try and take Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock's advice and convey to the audience: Everyone has something to feel guilty about.

Chris Mentillo

#9. The films I liked were European films-Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut.

Tobe Hooper

#10. Airing one's dirty linen never makes for a masterpiece.

Francois Truffaut

#11. Purely cinematic film ... actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.

Francois Truffaut

#12. When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.

Francois Truffaut

#13. Today, 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; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.

Francois Truffaut

#14. There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors

Francois Truffaut

#15. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#16. Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance.

Francois Truffaut

#17. I've always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job.

Francois Truffaut

#18. Truffaut loved Hitchcock.

Noah Baumbach

#19. Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.

Francois Truffaut

#20. I think Woody Allen calls it 'anxiety of influence.' When you're in your formative years and you watch a movie that makes you want to make movies ... For Wes Anderson, it's Truffaut. I'm sure for P.T. Anderson it was Scorsese and Jonathan Demme.

Max Winkler

#21. During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema.

Francois Truffaut

#22. What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation.

Francois Truffaut

#23. I could never have conceived that I would ever get to work in a Truffaut film. It was astonishing to me, and still is. I felt like an old pro, but it was still so unexpected.

Jacqueline Bisset

#24. Is the cinema more important than life?

Francois Truffaut

#25. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.

Francois Truffaut

#26. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#27. I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

Francois Truffaut

#28. You knew what was playing at Film Forum, and you corrected anyone who lumped Godard and Truffaut together.

Stephanie Danler

#29. Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

Francois Truffaut

#30. I prefer to be busy all day long, and when you work for someone else, you're not busy enough.

Francois Truffaut

#31. I think Ingmar Bergman, Francoise Truffaut - all these people created images in my mind, beautiful pictures, I loved what was known at that time as the foreign film.

Jackie DeShannon

#32. The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.

Francois Truffaut

#33. I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.

Francois Truffaut

#34. Truffaut loved actresses, and he was very intense. All the actresses I knew wanted to do a film with him.

Catherine Deneuve

#35. In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs

Francois Truffaut

#36. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#37. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#38. Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.

Francois Truffaut

#39. Francois Truffaut was my godfather on 'Sugar Cane Alley.' He believed in me and in that story, and told everyone that it should be made.

Euzhan Palcy

#40. 'Battleship' is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things.

Seth Shostak

#41. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#42. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#43. Life has more imagination than we do.

Francois Truffaut

#44. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#45. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#46. There's no such thing as an anti-war film,

Francois Truffaut

#47. All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance.

Francois Truffaut

#48. Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.

Francois Truffaut

#49. I'd skip school regularly to see movies - even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early.

Francois Truffaut

#50. I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

Francois Truffaut

#51. My father loved 'Godard and Truffaut.' He was more artsy. My mom loved the 'Bourne' trilogy; she likes big blockbusters. She loved that I did 'I Am Legend.' My passion for acting came with my passion for movies.

Alice Braga

#52. 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.

Francois Truffaut

#53. At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that.

Francois Truffaut