The Criterion Collection

Thank God I’m an atheist.

– Luis Buñuel

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

– Alfred Hitchcock

Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.

– Stanley Kubrick

Cinema’s characteristic forte is its ability to capture and communicate the intimacies of the human mind.

– Satyajit Ray

Jean-Luc Godard isn’t the only one who films the way he breathes, but he breathes the best.

– François Truffaut, L’Avant-Scène, 1967

I hope I never get so old I get religious.

– Ingmar Bergman

The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

– Jean Cocteau

Filmmaking is to me very similar to being in a café somewhere in Paris and looking at the people walking by.

– Claire Denis

I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater.

– Luchino Visconti

Extending the language of film sometimes starts with just trying to show one true thing.

– Samuel Fuller