Jean-Luc Godard quotes
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“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
-- Jean-Luc GodardSource : Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
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“What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”
-- Jean-Luc GodardSource : Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
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“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 GodardSource : Interview with Rosanna Greenstreet, www.theguardian.com. August 17, 2013.
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“It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“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 -
“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 GodardSource : "Godard". Book by Richard Roud, 1970.
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“You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”
-- Jean-Luc GodardSource : "Breathless continues to shock and surprise 50 years on" by Philip French, www.theguardian.com. Junuary 5, 2010.
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“When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“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 GodardSource : "Ideas, Not Plots, Inspire Jean-Luc Godard" by David Sterritt, www.csmonitor.com. August 03, 1994.
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“The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“To be or not to be. That's not really a question.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“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.”
-- 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.”
-- Jean-Luc GodardSource : "Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul: A Handbook of Transcultural Proverb and Sayings". Book by Fayek S. Hourani, p. 169, 2012.
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“There is no such thing as intellectual property.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“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.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.”
-- Jean-Luc GodardSource : Jean Luc Godard (1967). “Le Petit soldat: screenplay”
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“To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“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.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“When sex gets problematic, the totalitarianist walks in.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“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.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“The world isn't a sad place, it's just big.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.”
-- Jean-Luc GodardSource : Jean Luc Godard, David Sterritt (1998). “Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews”, p.29, Univ. Press of Mississippi
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“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.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“ALPHA-60: Your name is written "Ivan Johnson," but it is pronounced "Lemmy Caution," Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville. CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call "normal." ... ALPHA-60: You cannot escape. The door is locked. CAUTION: Try to stop me, pal.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie,”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“This is not a just image, this is just an image.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“One must confront vague ideas with clear images,”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“We once believed we were auteurs but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“The observer and the universe are part of the same universe. It's what science discovered at the beginning of this century, when they say you can't tell where an atomic particle is. You know where they are, but not their speed; or you know their speed but not their place, because it depends on you. The one who describes is part of the description.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
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“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”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.”
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
“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 GodardSource : "Predilections" by Mark Singer, The New Yorker, www.errolmorris.com. February 06, 1989.
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