Agnes Varda Quotes

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

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

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

Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

When artists die early, they become idols even more.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves – not so much to learn about me.

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

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.