Quotes from Agnes Varda

I don't watch my own films. There is little time; I'd rather see another film.

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 should say nothing! I'm through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time.

I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.

At that time, when I started, in the '50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.

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

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

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

I think people should be different. I love people who don't go by the rule that you have to be careful because you're old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that.

When artists die early, they become idols even more.

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don't even want to meet them or see them.

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

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

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.