“She almost doesn’t recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We’re the ones who are suffering. She’s not.”

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 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 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.

I’m missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

John Lewis we all know was beaten terribly, almost to an inch of his life, opened doors that will never be closed, although there are forces that are attempting to close those doors.

I own almost 100 hotels in North America. Some of them are only in management, but some of them we have some small stakes in them.

For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.

I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It’s almost like a painter having a model to become.

Almost every cartoonist, when he’s sitting down to draw a funny face.

You could almost call them marriages, even though I didn’t marry. But it was costly.

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.

My early career was a real rush of movies and stardom – it was almost overwhelming.