“I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials,”

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’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.

Suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.

I listen to music to when I’m feeling a certain way or to make myself feel a certain way. So why not make my own music inspired by true emotions?

There’s only one thing i know for certain anymore.” he turned, his eyes a clear black. “that i would do anything for you, even if it means going against mu instincts or my very nature. I would lay down everything i possess, even my soul, for you. If that isn’t love, it’s the best i have.

I’ve never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people.

The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.

The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you’ve…um…entertained his wife.

A good fragrance should have a certain personality that makes people identify the scent with you.