“American cinema is international like the fairy tales were international.”

Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics – religion, death, existentialism – to the screen. … But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.

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.

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely.

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

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

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

What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.

The future of cinema and communications is all about collaboration and the decentralized control of storytelling.

Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.