“I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don’t even want to meet them or see them.”

You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling.

My grandson says I’m punk.

I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.

I’d been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that’s part of being shy.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.

To share a lot of ideas – not ideas – emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.

Even Vagabond – it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

If you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way. I think that’s the way I felt when I was young.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

I was free always. I could work without the money, to film this and that. But this is another point, because now I’m alone, and I can just use it when I want.

I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that’s it. I don’t know why we should transform them.

Gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It’s just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.

I didn’t have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal – because I think cinema should come from cinema.

I try to do nothing. I drink rosemary when I have a lot of work to do. People take coffee, they take speed, whatever. I take rosemary.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.

The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.