FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT

An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal - falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.

Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.

I'd skip school regularly to see movies - even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early.

I've always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job.

Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

I prefer to be busy all day long, and when you work for someone else, you're not busy enough.

At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that.

During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema.

What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation.

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.

The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.

Film lovers are sick people.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

Is the cinema more important than life?

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.

The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.

Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.

The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has.

I may find myself changing my notions about what I want to do right in the middle of a film. And on days when I'm feeling merry, I shoot merry scenes, and on gloomy days, I shoot gloomy ones.

I am less instinctive as I try to be more professional - about the music, about the sound.

If I have some free time, I leave Paris with some books about the cinema. If I'm not filming, I'm watching films.

I want my audience to be constantly captivated, bewitched, so that it leaves the theatre dazed, stunned to be back on the pavement.

To be a film-maker, you are almost forced to be surrounded by contradictions... You must have talents of so many different kinds - talents that are contradictory.