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• Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
  • "What Is Cinema?" Les Amis du Cinéma (Paris, October 1, 1952).

• The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
  • "Strangers on a Train," Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, March 10, 1952).

• 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.
  • "Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction," Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, Sept. 15, 1952).

• All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
  • Journal entry, May 16, 1991.

• 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.
  • Quoted in Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1967, repr. 1970).

• 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.
  • Quoted in Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1970).

• Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
  • Le Petit Soldat (film) (direction and screenplay, 1960).
  • [variation] Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.

• "I would never see a good movie for the first time on television."
  • from Los Angeles Free Press, March 15, 1968. Gene Youngblood

• "...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."
  • from Los Angeles Free Press, March 22, 1968. Gene Youngblood

• "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!"
  • from The Christian Science Monitor - August 3, 1994. David Sterritt

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

• "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."
  • ibid.

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

See also

• Quotes about Television
• Quotes about the Movies