Quotes from Francois Truffaut

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.

Film lovers are sick people.

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs

But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That's not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it's because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, "When you love life, you go to the movies," it's false! It's exactly the opposite: when you don't love life, or when life doesn't give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.

Tu m'as dit ''Je t'aime'', je t'ai dit ''Attends''. J'allais dire ''Prends-moi'', tu m'as dit ''Va-t-en

I'm an unstable psychotic individual with perverted tendencies" -Juvenile Delinquent @Les Quatre Cents Coups

I never understood the meaning of a film. I am very concrete. I only understand what is on the screen. In my whole life, I have never understood a single symbol.

I saw plenty of differences in degree, but not in kind. I felt the same admiration for Kelly and Donen's Singin' in the Rain as for Carl Dreyer's Ordet . I still find any hierarchy of kinds of movies both ridiculous and despicable.

The camera should never anticipate what's about to follow.

To reproach Hitchcock for specializing in suspense is to accuse him of being the least boring of filmmakers; it is also tantamount to blaming a lover who instead of concentrating on his own pleasure insists on sharing it with his partner.

I am often asked at what point in my love affair with films I began to want to be a director or a critic. Truthfully, I don't know. All I know is that I wanted to get closer and closer to films.

Suspense is simply the dramatization of a film's narrative, or if you will, the most intense presentation possible of dramatic situations.

The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film.

I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.

Anyone can be a film critic. The apprentice supposedly need not possess a tenth of the knowledge that would be demanded of a critic of literature, music or painting. A director must live with the fact that his work will be called to judgment by someone who has never seen a film of Murnau's.

gatherings I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and observed a good deal. I've always been that way and still am. I was anything but expansive. I was a loner—can't remember ever

That's because the theme of the innocent man being accused, I feel, provides the audience with a greater sense of danger. It's easier for them to identify with him than with a guilty man on the run. I always take the audience into account.

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.

To clarify Rear Window, I'd suggest this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses. And Hitchcock? He is the man we love to be hated by.

I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war. To show something is to ennoble it.

Je fais des films pour réaliser mes rêves d'adolescent, pour me faire du bien et, si possible, faire du bien aux autres.

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