I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.

Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

Jean-Luc Godard

gambling movie beautiful

Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

Jean-Luc Godard

twenties photography inspiring

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

Jean-Luc Godard

inspiring inspirational reality

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

Jean-Luc Godard

reflection reality art

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

Jean-Luc Godard

void inspirational watches

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

Jean-Luc Godard

answers mean people

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

trying giving art

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

Jean-Luc Godard

movie should-have order

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.

Jean-Luc Godard

running ideas thinking

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

atoms way thinking

"Away, away," says hate. "Closer, closer," says love.

Jean-Luc Godard

hate

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

alive attention people

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

Jean-Luc Godard

cinema moments ideas

Even with a small video we will always be able to do a small movie with friends and to show it to someone. You won't get the Oscar for it. But, after all, why are you writing and why are you filming?

Jean-Luc Godard

oscars video writing

To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.

Jean-Luc Godard

enormous comic society-today

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

heartbeat space looks

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

movie kissing thinking

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.

Jean-Luc Godard

greek age civilization

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

Jean-Luc Godard

pity cinema ideas

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

Jean-Luc Godard

breathless should should-have