Quotes from Jean-Luc Godard

Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.

Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.

The Rolling Stones are much more accomplished than Jefferson Airplane, who are more like tribal people. That is, they present something which exists: The music and the hippie.

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

I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.

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

Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.

Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors nor lawyers or professors. That's why they concentrated on something new: cinema.

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

More or less, I am always saying, 'Let's do what has not been done.'

More or less, I am always saying, 'Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.'

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.

When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn't stand up for them.

A critic is a soldier that fires on his own men.

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

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

Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.

Once I had seen 'Journey to Italy,' I knew that, even if I were never to make movies, I could make them.

The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.

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

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.

I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.