JEAN-LUC GODARD

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.

Every edit is a lie.

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

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

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

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

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.

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

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.

I make film to make time pass.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

I know nothing of life except through the cinema.

I am trying to change the world.

The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone... means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them.

The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.

The history of cinema appears to be easy to do, since it is, after all, made up of images; cinema appears to be the only medium where all one has to do is re-project these images so that one can see what has happened.

I write and film history; I don't make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.

Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors nor lawyers or professors. That's why they concentrated on something new: cinema.