François Truffaut > Quotes

“Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.”
― François Truffaut

“Film lovers are sick people.”
― François Truffaut

“In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs”
― François Truffaut

“But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.”
― François Truffaut

“Today, I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.”
― Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“Life has more imagination than we do.”
― Truffaut François

“I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.”
― François Truffaut

“Tu m’as dit ‘’Je t’aime’’, je t’ai dit ‘’Attends’’. J’allais dire ‘’Prends-moi’’, tu m’as dit ‘’Va-t-en”
― françois truffaut, Jules et Jim

“I am the happiest man in the world and here's why: I walk down a street and I see a woman, not tall but well-proportioned, very dark-haired, very neat in her dress, wearing a dark skirt with deep pleats that swing with the rhythm of her rather quick steps; her stockings, of dark color, are carefully, impeccably smooth; her face is not smiling, this woman walks down the street without trying to please, as if she were unconscious of what she represented: a good carnal image of woman, a physical image, more than a sexy image, a sexual image. --Francois Truffaut, "Is Truffaut the Happiest Man on Earth? Yes," 1970”
― François Truffaut

“We must not make exaggerated demand on critics, and particularly we must not expect that criticism can function as an exact science. Art is not scientific; why should criticism be?

The main complaint against some critics--and a certain type of criticism--is that too seldom do they speak about cinema as such. The scenario of a film is the film; all films are not psychological.
Every critic should take to heart Jean Renoir's remark, "All great art is abstract." He should learn to be aware of form, and to understand that certain artists, for example Dreyer or Von Sternberg, never sought to make a picture that resembled reality.”
― François Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“The camera should never anticipate what’s about to follow.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut

“I saw plenty of differences in degree, but not in kind. I felt the same admiration for Kelly and Donen's Singin' in the Rain as for Carl Dreyer's Ordet.

I still find any hierarchy of kinds of movies both ridiculous and despicable.”
― François Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“I'm an unstable psychotic individual with perverted tendencies"
-Juvenile Delinquent @Les Quatre Cents Coups”
― François Truffaut

“The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut

“Suspense is simply the dramatization of a film’s narrative, or if you will, the most intense presentation possible of dramatic situations.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut

“To reproach Hitchcock for specializing in suspense is to accuse him of being the least boring of filmmakers; it is also tantamount to blaming a lover who instead of concentrating on his own pleasure insists on sharing it with his partner.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock

“I never understood the meaning of a film. I am very concrete. I only understand what is on the screen. In my whole life, I have never understood a single symbol.”
― François Truffaut

“I am often asked at what point in my love affair with films I began to want to be a director or a critic. Truthfully, I don't know. All I know is that I wanted to get closer and closer to films.”
― François Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“Anyone can be a film critic. The apprentice supposedly need not possess a tenth of the knowledge that would be demanded of a critic of literature, music or painting. A director must live with the fact that his work will be called to judgment by someone who has never seen a film of Murnau’s.”
― François Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“There are two kinds of directors; those who have the public in mind when they conceive and make their films and those who don't consider the public at all. For the former, cinema is an art of spectacle; for the latter, it is an individual adventure. There is nothing intrinsically better about one or the other; it's simply a matter of different approaches. For Hitchcock as for Renoir, as for that matter almost all American directors, a film has not succeeded unless it is a success, that is, unless it touches the public that one has had in mind right from the moment of choosing the subject matter to the end of production. While Bresson, Tati, Rossellini, Ray make films their own way and then invite the public to join the "game," Renoir, Clouzot, Hitchcock and Hawks make movies for the public, and ask themselves all the questions they think will interest their audience. Alfred Hitchcock, who is a remarkably intelligent man, formed the habit early--right from the start of his career in England--of predicting each aspect of his films. All his life he has worked to make his own tastes coincide with the public', emphasizing humor in his English period and suspense in his American period. This dosage of humor and suspense has made Hitchcock one of the most commercial directors in the world (his films regularly bring in four times what they cost). It is the strict demands he makes on himself and on his art that have made him a great director.”
― François Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.”
― François Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war. To show something is to ennoble it.”
― François Truffaut

“That’s because the theme of the innocent man being accused, I feel, provides the audience with a greater sense of danger. It’s easier for them to identify with him than with a guilty man on the run. I always take the audience into account.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock

“Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired all over the world. Young people who are just discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo, or through North by Northwest, may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this is far from being the case.

In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course, famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case.

His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film.
(...)
In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock.
That is what this book is all about.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut

“gatherings I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and observed a good deal. I’ve always been that way and still am. I was anything but expansive. I was a loner—can’t remember ever”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock

“I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.”
― François Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“To clarify Rear Window, I’d suggest this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses. And Hitchcock? He is the man we love to be hated by.”
― François Truffaut, The Films in My Life

“judge: I think we should place your child under observation in a special home.
Gilberte Doinel: Could it be by the sea, Your Honor?
From The 400 Blows (1959)”
― François Truffaut

“Hitchcock: Definitely, I think the most interesting women, sexually, are the English women. I feel that the English women, the Swedes, the northern Germans, and Scandinavians are a great deal more exciting than the Latin, the Italian, and the French women. Sex should not be advertised. An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into a cab with you and, to your surprise, she’ll probably pull a man’s pants open.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut

“His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock