Top 120 Quotes & Sayings by Agnes Varda

Like everybody, I wanted to meet Andy Warhol. I was impressed by his work and how daring he was. I think he changed the cinema completely, simply by opening his camera and letting it go.

I don't want to become a serious, annoying sociologist. I try to regard sociology as a part of everyday life.

I didn't see myself as a woman doing film but as a radical film-maker who was a woman.

I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.

I saw 'Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs' when it came out, didn't like it too much. I found she was stupid.

I make documentaries from time to time to remind myself of reality. It's like musicians doing scales to keep their fingers working: when you're in the street, listening to people, you're forced to be in the service of your subject.

When artists die early, they become idols even more.

Sometimes I do things that are not really the right way because I'm daring, in a way.

Aging for me is not a condition but a subject.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

I wore black until I was twenty-five, like many young people. Everybody did. It was crazy! But now, getting older, I think color does me good.

I think I was a feminist before being born. I had a feminist chromosome somewhere.

When I love somebody, I cannot drop it out of my life. Love is not something like you open and you close, you know?

I enjoy the time passing. I think it's a privilege to be in friendship with time.

I've always loved polka dots. Ah, oui. It is a joyful shape, the polka dot. It is alive.

My mind is often half-sleeping, like in a daydream.

I didn't have a career; I made films. It's very different.

My parents named me Arlette, and I changed it to Agnes when I was young. I didn't like it because I don't like names with 'ette' - you know, it looks like a little girl's name.

I had flops, I had success.

I am a woman. I think I have the spirit, the intelligence, and - dare I say - the soul of a woman.

Aging is interesting, you know? I really love it.

I'm curious. Period. I find everything interesting. Real life. Fake life. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But mostly people. If you keep your eyes open and your mind open, everything can be interesting.

When I was younger, people were inventing a new way of writing - James Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. And I thought we had to find a structure for cinema. I fought for a radical cinema, and I continued all my life.

I was not raised with films. And when Alain Resnais did the editing on my first film, he said, 'You should go to the Cinematheque.' I didn't even know we had one in Paris.

I wasn't attracted to American cinema, but I fell in love with Los Angeles the minute I arrived.

Maybe something that amuses the Americans is that they are so worried about age, and I'm not at all.

I am small. I was always small. But only physically.

My father was Greek, but he turned French during the war, and my mother was French. So I'm French, but I have Greek blood.

The mirror is the tool of the one who wants to do a self-portrait. And if you want to make a photo you need a mirror.

To share a lot of ideas - not ideas - emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.

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.

I didn't go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.

This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat.

Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work. Just yesterday I saw a good film, but even if I'd seen a bad one, I'd feel, "Oh my god, what a bad job, I can do better."

When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started - I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it's so beautiful - I should be a filmmaker!

I had a world. I don't think I had a career. I made films.

I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it's been a struggle.

Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.

An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - she almost doesn't recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We're the ones who are suffering. She's not.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer. Women have to make jokes about themselves, laugh about themselves, because they have nothing to lose.

You have to invent life.

I'm interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don't want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.

It's nice to think that we have in ourselves the energy. It's somewhere, but it's sleeping sometimes. I try to wake it up when I need it.

I'm missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.

I'm trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It's my white hair, and I put color there. My grandson says I'm punk.

Nostalgia doesn't make sense, because it's like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I'm inside my memories the same way I'm inside my everyday life.

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

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

I'm still fighting. I don't know how much longer, but I'm still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

I've always been like this - trying to find adventure where it's still in its first élan - the first spring.

I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure - stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don't believe that old people can feel that they are orphans.

My company is called Ciné-Tamaris, which is rosemary. That's my speed. Hot water and herb.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing. But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don't want time to come back.