Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

Speaking at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival about filmmaker Michael Moore: "Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary."

(on cinema) Truth twenty-four times a second.

(on Los Angeles) "It`s a big garage."

Up to now -- since shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution -- most movie makers have been assuming that they know how to make movies. Just like a bad writer doesn`t ask himself if he`s really capable of writing a novel -- he thinks he knows. If movie makers were building airplanes, there would be an accident every time one took off. But in the movies, these accidents are called Oscars.

It`s over. There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed.

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

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.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

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.

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

In a house there is the top floor and there is the cellar. The underground filmmakers live in the same house as Hollywood, but they work in the cellar. It`s up to them if they like to live in the dark. The Hollywood filmmakers are more intelligent, because they have that sunny top floor.

Every edit is a lie.

I don`t think you should FEEL about a movie. You should feel about a woman. You can`t kiss a movie.

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

I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. I`m still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of `Cahiers du Cinema.` The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.

My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.

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.

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

You don`t make a movie, the movie makes you.

I make film to make time pass.

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.

There is no point in having sharp images when you`ve fuzzy ideas.

In the beginning I believed in Cannes, but now it`s just for publicity. 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.

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.

All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.

What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war.

Tracking shots are a question of morality.

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

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

Photography is truth.