“I see all these students, and I admire them – they’re trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help.”

I never fought, I never learned kung fu or boxing, I never went into these sportif competitions. I wouldn’t cross the ocean.

I did not think that woman would be restrained. I never saw that, especially not in filmmaking, where you don’t have to be strong.

I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo – and I kept it all my life!

I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure – stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.

People like my films. They understand me through my films; it’s like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.

I don’t watch my own films. There is little time; I’d rather see another film.

Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.

I live in cinema. I feel I’ve lived here forever.

I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject.

I didn’t go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.

I should say nothing! I’m through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time.

It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing.

I tried to find a language for the film – not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain.

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don’t believe that old people can feel that they are orphans.

Learn from the past. Live in the present. Prepare for the future.

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.

I am learning to accept that I was never too much you just couldn’t handle all that I am made of.

Man has always learned from past. After all, you can’t learn history in reverse.

When the chaos creates comfort, and pain stops hurting your head, when you learn and accept the whole world, You know you possess yourself.

I have no comfort left to offer you, no love I’m willing to give, I’ve learnt years ago that you will always ask for what you can’t return.

The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.

Sunflowers adapt to let the light reach them and I’m learning to do the same.