'Cinema is the most beautiful fraud': 10 profound sayings of Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard was the ingenious “enfant terrible” of the French New Wave who revolutionised popular cinema in 1960, and was one of the world's most vital and provocative directors.

Ever since he started his career in the 1950's he rewrote rules for camera, sound and narrative. Some of his later day films, often politically charged and experimental, pleased few outside a small circle of fans and frustrated many critics.

The maverick film director was famous -- infamous even -- for his maxims on life and films. Across the decades some of his choicest sayings still intrigue fans and academics. Here is a small collection of ten.

• A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

• Photography is truth, and the cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

• Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

• Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

• Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

• My greatest ambition? To become immortal... and then die.

• Every edit is a lie.

• Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That's why the American cinema is so bad now.

• To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

• The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.

• Through most of my career, I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.