Agnes Varda

“I didn't have a career; I made films. It's very different.”

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

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

“I had flops, I had success.”

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

“Sometimes I do things that are not really the right way because I'm daring, in a way.”

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

“Aging for me is not a condition but a subject.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“I think I was a feminist before being born. I had a feminist chromosome somewhere.”

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

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