People like to say, ‘What do you mean exactly?’ I would answer, ‘I mean, but not exactly.’
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.
Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.
When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.
It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.
Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?
Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.
I don’t think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can’t kiss a movie.
The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and ‘get’ everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don’t understand each atom of the potato!
There is no such thing as intellectual property.
You don’t make a movie, the movie makes you.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
There is no point in having sharp images when you’ve fuzzy ideas.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.