Luc Godard Quotes

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to." [MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]

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

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to.

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)

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

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.

To be immortal and then die

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

The world isn't a sad place, it's just big.

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

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

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.

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.

Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.

What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.

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

Every edit is a lie.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second

Photography is truth.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

Le cinéma, c'est vingt-quatre fois la vérité par seconde.

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

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

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.

Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.

i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.

My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.

It's not where you take things from - it's where you take things to.

Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That’s why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society.

Good films get smaller audiences, but more of the viewer.

Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution — turn one’s back on American cinema.

Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. "Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.

Patricia: Do you know William Faulkner? Michel: No. Who's he? Have you slept with him?

Don’t ever promise to adore me forever. Let’s keep the feeling that this love of ours is a love without tomorow.

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.

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

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

The most fantastic thing you could film is people reading. I don't see why no one's done it... The movie you'd make would be a lot more interesting than most of them.

Humane people don't start revolutions, they start libraries. And cemeteries.

In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday. She is not beautiful, mocked, cursed or disowned by all. But don’t be mistaken, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind; for there is a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule; cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed; Gershwin, Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni, Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes.

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.

One can enjoy existence, not life.

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

It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to

There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual

One might almost say that to live in society today is something like living inside an enormous comic strip.

Communism existed once, during two 45 minute half-times, when Honved, from Budapest, won over England by 6-3. The English played individually, and the Hungarians, collectively.

I always feel that a man and a woman, who do not like the same films, will eventually divorce.

Change nothing so that everything will be different

Take a drawing by Matisse, a simple curve of a leg or a shoulder. Is there a basis, at the beginning when he starts drawing his curve? There isn’t. This is what I’m trying to say. And that’s what comprises the originality of Max Ophuls, which he acquired a little bit at a time, because in Liebelei, in Letter from an Unknown Woman, in his American films, it’s not there. It’s a freedom that is earned and that is found, that isn’t applied. On a basic level, it’s neither better nor worse as a way of making a film. But there’s something extremely original that we found so satisfying back in the day and that continues to satisfy me now … There’s a kind of pure cinema of that era – you might even call it experimental – which has disappeared. There’s no literature…not that there’s no text or dialogue, but there’s no pre-literature. (Jean-Luc Godard in conversation with Marcel Ophuls, 2002)

To be immortal and then die.

It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to.

Car celui qui saute dans le vide n’a plus de comptes à rendre à ceux qui le regardent.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

Alphaville is the title of one of my favorite movies. Jean-Luc Godard.

« Mais puisque je ne peux pas m’arracher à l’objectivité qui m’écrase, ni à la subjectivité qui m’exile, puisqu’il ne m’est pas possible de m’élever jusqu’à l’être, ni de tomber dans le néant, il faut que j’écoute. Il faut que je regarde autour de moi plus que jamais… Le monde… Mon semblable… Mon frère… »

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.

Art’s despair: its desperate attempt to create the imperishable from what perishes, from words, sounds, stones, colors, so that the space formed might outlast time. Although the mighty build halls, filling them with torches and music, surrounding themselves with bodies and more bodies, and faces and more faces… that too was but a kind of sleep.

We're born in the museum, it's our homeland after all...

Listen to me, normal one! We see a truth that you no longer see. A truth that says the essence of man is love and faith, courage and tenderness, generosity and sacrifice.

Art and theory of art, at one and the same time ; beauty and the secret of beauty ; cinema, and apologia for cinema. ' - Godard on Godard: Critical Writings

Il est facile de choisir les rideaux les plus jolis, les meubles les plus parfaits, de faire les seuls mouvements d’appareil possibles, si l’on sait d’avance que J’on est doué pour ça. De la part d’un artiste, trop bien se connaître, c’est un peu céder à la facilité. Ce qui est difficile, au contraire, c’est d’avancer en terre inconnue, de reconnaître le danger, de prendre des risques, d’avoir peur.

But the strength that remains, which is principally destructive, is the film's dialectical relationship to most of the other movies that we see, its capacity to make their most time-honored conventions seem tedious, shopworn, and unnecessary. This originality often seems to be driven by hatred and anger, emotions that are undervalued in more cowardly periods such as the present...

Sólo puedo, en efecto, ser el enemigo de nuestro tiempo ya que su tarea apunta justamente a la abolición del tiempo en el que no veo, en ese estado, que una vida merezca ser vivida

Es hora de que el pensamiento vuelva a ser lo que es, peligroso para el pensador y transformador de lo real

It's not where you take things from--it's where you take them to.

The Children of Marx & Coca-Cola {Limerick} There was a maverick auteur from France who assumed a rebellious stance. His name was Jean-Luc Godard, one part frog, two parts canard, who yanked at the strings of Hollywood's slick song and dance.

kurmaca bir “otomobil uygarlığı” hicviydi: Jean-Luc Godard’ın Weekend filmi (1967).

- Quelle est votre ambition dans la vie ?” “- Devenir immortel, puis mourir.

Hayvan gibi yaşamak için bu dünyaya gelmedik. Fazilet ve ilmi takip etmek için buradayız.

El cine, como el cristianismo, no se funda en una verdad histórica, nos da un relato, una historia, y nos dice ahora: cree, y no dice concede a este relato, a esta historia, la fe propia de la historia sino: cree, pase lo que pase

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: " It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: " It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.

Cads kill me. Men who go through life making wisecracks, being overtly rude, taking advantage, being self-obsessed disasters. They're just funny to me. Because of this hobbyhorse, one of my favorite films is Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard.

Patricia: “Quelle est votre plus grande ambition dans la vie?” Le romancier Parvulesco: “Devenir immortel... et puis... mourir.

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