Top 90 Agnes Varda Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I’m missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.”

— Agnes Varda

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

— Agnes Varda

3. “I live in cinema. I feel I’ve lived here forever.”

— Agnes Varda

4. “The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .”

— Agnes Varda

5. “You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling.”

— Agnes Varda

6. “You have to invent life.”

— Agnes Varda

7. “I’m not nostalgic. My memories are back here in my mind.”

— Agnes Varda

8. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

9. “People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don’t believe that old people can feel that they are orphans.”

— Agnes Varda

10. “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”

— Agnes Varda

11. “Si on ouvrait des gens, on trouverait des paysages. Si on m’ouvrait moi, on trouverait des plages.”

— Agnes Varda

12. “Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don’t want time to come back.”

— Agnes Varda

13. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

14. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

15. “Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.”

— Agnes Varda

16. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

17. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

18. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

19. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

20. “I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it’s been a struggle.”

— Agnes Varda

21. “I’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.”

— Agnes Varda

22. “Nostalgia doesn’t make sense, because it’s like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I’m inside my memories the same way I’m inside my everyday life.”

— Agnes Varda

23. “The story of a couple is always very fragile, especially over more than thirty years. People know it’s not easy, and even though you have strong feeling and desire and endless love, it doesn’t always happen.”

— Agnes Varda

24. “I never met Publo Picasso. I took pictures at the Festival d’Avignon, but I was too shy to ask to go in his studio. It does not look like me now, but I was very shy, and shy of men also. I think there was a world that frightened me totally.”

— Agnes Varda

25. “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!”

— Agnes Varda

26. “I should say nothing! I’m through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time.”

— Agnes Varda

27. “I go back to many films that I really love. Some Bresson, some Godard of the early times, the Cassavetes of those years I love. And the early Wim Wenders. But my own films I don’t watch, unless I need them.”

— Agnes Varda

28. “I had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.”

— Agnes Varda

29. “Whatever your brilliance, your pessimism, your thoughts about existence, the answer is always... Life. It’s not a dialectical idea, it’s a lived contradiction. Gramsci said, ‘We have to be pessimists in our thinking and optimists in our actions.”

— Agnes Varda

30. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

31. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

32. “Gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It’s just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.”

— Agnes Varda

33. “Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.”

— Agnes Varda

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

— Agnes Varda

35. “When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.”

— Agnes Varda

36. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

37. “I try to do nothing. I drink rosemary when I have a lot of work to do. People take coffee, they take speed, whatever. I take rosemary.”

— Agnes Varda

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

— Agnes Varda

39. “Happiness is a beautiful fruit that tastes of cruelty.”

— Agnes Varda

40. “Sometimes I want to work with a DP, sometimes I want to work myself. I go to 35mm, 16mm, it’s all the same, but it depends on what you want to tell and what are the tools you need.”

— Agnes Varda

41. “To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States – black people didn’t have the right to vote.”

— Agnes Varda

42. “Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work. Just yesterday I saw a good film, but even if I’d seen a bad one, I’d feel, “Oh my god, what a bad job, I can do better.””

— Agnes Varda

43. “I made a braid because Chinese old people, they say that the God will take you by the hair to join you with – but God didn’t take me, so I cut the braid.”

— Agnes Varda

44. “I don’t try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers. Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.”

— Agnes Varda

45. “The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It’s unbelievable. The film critics don’t know my artwork and the art world doesn’t know my films.”

— Agnes Varda

46. “I’ve changed my approach to people and to filming because of the new equipment, which is important.”

— Agnes Varda

47. “A lot of good men had been thinking for us. Marx did. Engels did. These people did beautifully. Yet maybe we need to get through Marx, for Marx doesn’t give the keys and answers for us women.′ If women must independently find their images, what of feminist-friendly men? ‘If men want to join, leave the door open. They can listen,’ Varda says.”

— Agnes Varda

48. “I don’t watch my own films. There is little time; I’d rather see another film.”

— Agnes Varda

49. “If you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way. I think that’s the way I felt when I was young.”

— Agnes Varda

50. “It’s peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families.”

— Agnes Varda