Quotes from Francois Truffaut

If I have some free time, I leave Paris with some books about the cinema. If I'm not filming, I'm watching films.

Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance.

Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

I'd skip school regularly to see movies - even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early.

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.

There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors

Film lovers are sick people.

What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation.

To be a film-maker, you are almost forced to be surrounded by contradictions... You must have talents of so many different kinds - talents that are contradictory.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

Life has more imagination than we do.

Is the cinema more important than life?

Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.

At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.

I want my audience to be constantly captivated, bewitched, so that it leaves the theatre dazed, stunned to be back on the pavement.

Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.

An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal - falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.

The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.

The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has.

During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema.

The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.

I am less instinctive as I try to be more professional - about the music, about the sound.