Top 30 François Truffaut Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Film lovers are sick people.”

— François Truffaut

2. “Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.”

— François Truffaut

3. “I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.”

— François Truffaut

4. “When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.”

— François Truffaut

5. “The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.”

— François Truffaut

6. “There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors.”

— François Truffaut

7. “Life has more imagination than we do.”

— François Truffaut

8. “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.”

— François Truffaut

9. “The man who thinks he can do without the world is indeed mistaken; but the man who thinks the world cannot do without him is mistaken even worse.”

— François Truffaut

10. “Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.”

— François Truffaut

11. “We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.”

— François Truffaut

12. “Airing one’s dirty linen never makes for a masterpiece.”

— François Truffaut

13. “Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.”

— François Truffaut

14. “Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance.”

— François Truffaut

15. “Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.”

— François Truffaut

16. “The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a movie theatre is to go down to the front and turn around, and look at all the uplifted faces, the light from the screen reflected upon them.”

— François Truffaut

17. “When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it’s just wonderful.”

— François Truffaut

18. “I prefer to be busy all day long, and when you work for someone else, you’re not busy enough.”

— François Truffaut

19. “Is the cinema more important than life?”

— François Truffaut

20. “The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has.”

— François Truffaut

21. “In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.”

— François Truffaut

22. “I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.”

— François Truffaut

23. “A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking-it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.”

— François Truffaut

24. “An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal – falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.”

— François Truffaut

25. “I’ve always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job.”

— François Truffaut

26. “I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.”

— François Truffaut

27. “All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They’re obliged to overstate their own importance.”

— François Truffaut

28. “What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation.”

— François Truffaut

29. “I am often asked at what point in my love affair with films I began to want to be a director or a critic. Truthfully, I don’t know. All I know is that I wanted to get closer and closer to films.”

— François Truffaut

30. “At first, I wasn’t sure whether I’d be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that.”

— François Truffaut

31. “During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema.”

— François Truffaut

32. “Some day I’ll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.”

— François Truffaut

33. “I’d skip school regularly to see movies – even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early.”

— François Truffaut

34. “I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I’d be a novelist.”

— François Truffaut