Cinema Quotes

“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life. ”
― Fellini

“That was horrible. Horrible. That poor little guy."
Pex was unrepentant. "Yeah, well, he asked for it. Calling us ... all those things."
But---buried alive! That's like in that horror movie. Y'know -- the one with all the horror."
I think I saw that one. With all the words going up on the screen at the end?"
Yeah, that was it. Tell you the truth, those words kinda ruined it for me.”
― Eoin Colfer, The Eternity Code

“There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.

— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón”
― Mitch Glazer

“Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy.”
― Björk

“Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.”
― Roger Zelazny, Prince of Chaos

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out”
― Martin Scorsese

“I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.”
― D.W. Griffith

“Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.”
― Werner Herzog

“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

“My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films.”
― Woody Allen

“Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!”
― Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge

“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

“Do you know anything about silent films?"
"Sure," I said. "The first ones were developed in the late nineteenth century and sometimes had live musical accompaniment, though it wasn't until the 1920s that sound became truly incorporated into films, eventually making silent ones obsolete in cinema.”
― Richelle Mead, Bloodlines

“Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”
― André Bazin

“Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.”
― Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh

“I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.”
― Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock/Truffaut

“The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”
― Ingmar Bergman

“When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part.
What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice...it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous...”
― J. Michael Straczynski

“Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?”
― Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

“Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc...) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create”
― Robert Bresson , Notes on the Cinematographer

“We didn't need sex. We had Tyrone Power.”
― Barbara Cartland

“R means under 18 accompanied by an adult. Therefore all corporately funded films in the US must be made with the concept that those under the age of 18 are able to view the film. This means all corporately funded films in the US are made for the eyes of children.”
― Crispin H. Glover

“Don't be a zombie for anyone, if your oppressor likes zombies, cinemas are not located in mars.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Take a drawing by Matisse, a simple curve of a leg or a shoulder. Is there a basis, at the beginning when he starts drawing his curve? There isn’t. This is what I’m trying to say. And that’s what comprises the originality of Max Ophuls, which he acquired a little bit at a time, because in Liebelei, in Letter from an Unknown Woman, in his American films, it’s not there. It’s a freedom that is earned and that is found, that isn’t applied. On a basic level, it’s neither better nor worse as a way of making a film. But there’s something extremely original that we found so satisfying back in the day and that continues to satisfy me now … There’s a kind of pure cinema of that era – you might even call it experimental – which has disappeared. There’s no literature…not that there’s no text or dialogue, but there’s no pre-literature.

(Jean-Luc Godard in conversation with Marcel Ophuls, 2002)”
― Jean-Luc Godard

“Most of the movies are working like, 'Information, cut, information, cut, information, cut' and for them the information is just the story. For me, a lot of things [are] information - I try to involve, to the movie, the time, the space, and a lot of other things - which is a part of our life but not connecting directly to the story-telling. And I'm working on the same way - 'information, cut, information, cut,' but for me the information is not only the story.”
― Béla Tarr

“Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing”
― Robert Bresson

“Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation