Top 90 Agnes Varda Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words – this is a book!”

— Agnes Varda

52. “It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves – not so much to learn about me.”

— Agnes Varda

53. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

54. “Le Bonheur is strange, Documenteur is sad, Sans Toit ni Loi pessimistic but I try to keep somewhere in these films – even in the darkest of them – a feeling of energy. That’s different from pessimism or optimism. Inside these films, the mental activity and the pleasure of filming come together to create an energy that ends up replacing the feelings of happiness or sadness. Vital energy...”

— Agnes Varda

55. “I was eighteen, this was back in ’46, so we also had these very frightening images of soldiers in the streets of Paris. So the effect of war, plus my shyness, plus my lack of education – I was afraid of men, really. It changes later, but it took me a certain time to adjust.”

— Agnes Varda

56. “Some people meet each other again only when I’m there!”

— Agnes Varda

57. “I see all these students, and I admire them – they’re trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I’m sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was – that’s the way I was – autodidact.”

— Agnes Varda

58. “I’m myself – knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I’m what I’m not.”

— Agnes Varda

59. “I had flops, I had success.”

— Agnes Varda

60. “I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject.”

— Agnes Varda

61. “I think we need to have a nest of something which is family.”

— Agnes Varda

62. “Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.”

— Agnes Varda

63. “We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond – it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.”

— Agnes Varda

64. “I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials, I don’t do films pre-prepared by other people, I don’t do star system. So I do my own little thing.”

— Agnes Varda

65. “I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.”

— Agnes Varda

66. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

67. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

68. “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.”

— Agnes Varda

69. “I cannot say something different to one person and then another.”

— Agnes Varda

70. “At that time, when I started, in the ’50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.”

— Agnes Varda

71. “Sometimes, even with a film I really love, I cannot tell the story precisely. Sometimes I cannot even tell what happened chronologically. But I’ll have flashes of some things. Sometimes it looks almost like a still. What I know, what I can remember is the emotion I felt. I know I loved a film because I remember feeling good in the film or feeling odd when I came out, either in tears or touched or mad.”

— Agnes Varda

72. “Every time you make a film, you learn something. You approach other people, other people’s work, some landscape you never noticed before. It’s like giving sudden life to what you see and capturing the beauty in it.”

— Agnes Varda

73. “People like my films. They understand me through my films; it’s like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.”

— Agnes Varda

74. “I didn’t have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal – because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that’s it. I don’t know why we should transform them.”

— Agnes Varda

75. “If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.”

— Agnes Varda

76. “I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo – and I kept it all my life!”

— Agnes Varda

77. “The most current thing about my work is me on the day I’m shooting.”

— Agnes Varda

78. “You know, an hour and fifty-four minutes is too much for audiences. They get nervous.”

— Agnes Varda

79. “I’d been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that’s part of being shy.”

— Agnes Varda

80. “They always want us to tell stories with action and psychological drama but there are other very interesting directions we can take in time, space, and memory. Emotions, recollections, surprises.”

— Agnes Varda

81. “I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn’t do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working.”

— Agnes Varda

82. “You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.”

— Agnes Varda

83. “I think I did fifteen long features and fifteen documentaries, or something like this, which is very little when you think of people making a film every year. Some people have done fifty or sixty films.”

— Agnes Varda

84. “I’d say, rather, the unreal that finds expression in the real; the fantastic; a certain surrealism in daily life which ultimately evokes the magic of the chance encounter, the collage of life.”

— Agnes Varda

85. “It is a question of our minds. What culture deals with is not that we have to learn to see all the Italian painting, all the Spanish painting, this is pilling up information about culture. But what culture means is that we are able to associate real things, nature, paintings we have seen, music we have heard, a book we have read, a film we saw, with our real life, our emotional life, which means a lot.”

— Agnes Varda

86. “So I had a slight inferiority complex that I had a limit. And after, not only did I get over this complex but I realized that this complex was silly because the role of a woman is not to prove that she can do all that a man can do or knows how to do. On the contrary, the role of a woman is to do what she feels she should do as a woman. And if she wants to do things that are different from what men do then all the better.”

— Agnes Varda

87. “I cannot plan anything. I have to have the desire to make a film. Then it’s a joy. You have to pick something you believe in. You have to believe it’s worth it, and that it makes sense for you to do it. If I don’t have that much passion, I won’t work.”

— Agnes Varda

88. “I let things happen because I never make a film that people ask me to do or bring me a package with a good book and two actors and all that. I think cinema should be made by coming from nowhere to becoming a film. This I believe in.”

— Agnes Varda

89. “I understood that this is to be an artist, you know – because you work by intuition. You go to the right thing, to the right place, to the right image, with your own feelings.”

— Agnes Varda

90. “It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.”

— Agnes Varda

91. “What I’m saying is that a screenplay – and I am a screenplay writer when I make fiction films – often does not have the distinctive quality of imagination that real life has.”

— Agnes Varda