“We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more.”

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’m myself – knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers.

An old woman I loved very much when I was young – the wife of Jean Villard – she’s just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That’s all she does.

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, “Le jeu et les moi.” It’s impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound.

I don’t do films pre-prepared by other people, I don’t do star system. So I do my own little thing.

I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It’s my white hair, and I put color there.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done – people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway – in France we have Nathalie Sarraute – and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater.

Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work.

This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.

I’m not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman – not unless she is looking for new images.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don’t want time to come back.

Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.