Agnes Varda
I am a woman. I think I have the spirit, the intelligence, and - dare I say - the soul of a woman.Collection: Intelligence
I enjoy the time passing. I think it's a privilege to be in friendship with time.Collection: Friendship
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.
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'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.
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 wasn't attracted to American cinema, but I fell in love with Los Angeles the minute I arrived.
I didn't see myself as a woman doing film but as a radical film-maker who was a woman.
I didn't have a career; I made films. It's very different.
I had flops, I had success.
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 think I was a feminist before being born. I had a feminist chromosome somewhere.
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.
Aging is interesting, you know? I really love it.
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.
Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.
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.
When artists die early, they become idols even more.
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.
My mind is often half-sleeping, like in a daydream.
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 saw 'Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs' when it came out, didn't like it too much. I found she was stupid.
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.
Maybe something that amuses the Americans is that they are so worried about age, and I'm not at all.
I don't want to become a serious, annoying sociologist. I try to regard sociology as a part of everyday life.
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.
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.Collection: Movie
If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.Collection: People
I live in cinema. I feel I've lived here forever.Collection: Movie
This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat.Collection: Cat
The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .Collection: Mirrors
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.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Strong
I had a world. I don't think I had a career. I made films.Collection: Thinking
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!Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Vagabonds
Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.Collection: Feminist
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Mean
Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.Collection: Strong
I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it's been a struggle.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: School
I'm trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.Collection: People
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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Hair
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.Collection: Beautiful