Top 44 Quotes & Sayings by Francois Truffaut

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

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

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

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

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Is the cinema more important than life?

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.

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

The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.

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

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.

Film lovers are sick people.

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

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

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

Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.

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.

Airing one's dirty linen never makes for a masterpiece.

When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.

A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking-it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.

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.

There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors

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.

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.

I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.

The man who thinks he can do without the world is indeed mistaken; but the man who thinks the world cannot do without him is mistaken even worse.

We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.

Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.

Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance.

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.

Life has more imagination than we do.

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.

Purely cinematic film ... actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.

The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a movie theatre is to go down to the front and turn around, and look at all the uplifted faces, the light from the screen reflected upon them.

There's no such thing as an anti-war film.

All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance.