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Quotes by French Authors
"A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day."
"Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?"
"Speech is external thought, and thought internal speech."
"My parents always told me that if you want something, you can do whatever you have to do to get it. As long as it's not against someone else."
"I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure."
"If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director."
"People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout."
"I understood immediately that to get success I had to make for the front door, not for the back one."
"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
"People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug."
"Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear."
"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."
"But no one frees himself from being in love in three days."
"The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual."
"I will only observe, that that ethereal sense - sight, and touch, which is at the other extremity of the scale, have from time acquired a very remarkable additional power."
"Whereas Schaeffer and Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn't be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character."
"I am never driven. Every film I've made has been an assignment."
"The idea of seeing everybody clad the same is not really my cup of tea."
"A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it."
"I had to think whether, after 50 years of hard slog, I was still lucid and fresh enough for the job."
"To live happily with other people, ask of them only what they can give."
"A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world."
"All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs."
"Work at the same time on sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis... Don't be afraid of putting on colour... Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression."
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