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

I had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

I don’t try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers.

I go back to many films that I really love.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

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.

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.

Be not entangled in this world of days and nights; Thou hast another time and space as well.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

Rock n’ roll sounded like music from another planet. The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis – all them people.

Prince Paul is another good friend; he’s like an older brother. He’ll criticise and be brutally honest with you. That’s what I like about Paul.

Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.

You know, I have several projects coming up between 2014 and 2015, and hopefully by 2015, I’ll have another hour of stand-up material where I’ll be able to go on the road and tour again.

If I say I like one person, that means everybody that voted for the other person doesn’t like me. So, why would I do that?