Quotes by Filmmakers - Page 30

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.
Michael Crichton
Intelligence is a burden not many are willing or able to carry.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Well,” Harry said, “look at it this way: Suppose you were an intelligent bacterium floating in space, and you came upon one of our communication satellites, in orbit around the Earth. You would think, What a strange, alien object this is, let’s explore it. Suppose you opened it up and crawled inside. You would find it very interesting in there, with lots of huge things to puzzle over. But eventually you might climb into one of the fuel cells, and the hydrogen would kill you. And your last thought would be: This alien device was obviously made to test bacterial intelligence and to kill us if we make a false step.“Now, that would be correct from the standpoint of the dying bacterium. But that wouldn’t be correct at all from the standpoint of the beings who made the satellite. From our point of view, the communications satellite has nothing to do with intelligent bacteria. We don’t even know that there are intelligent bacteria out there. We’re just trying to communicate, and we’ve made what we consider a quite ordinary device to do it.
Michael Crichton
Higher intelligence is not necessarily something you’re born with or genetically predisposed toward. In fact, most instances of above-the-ordinary intelligences are usually acquired thru superior learning techniques ... Reading about the greatest minds in history, including recent history, more often than not reveals the individuals concerned (or people close to them) employed specific learning methods.
James Morcan
I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.
David Lynch
Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.
Chris Kraus
The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields.
James Morcan
It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.
Michael Crichton
The human spirit will not invest itself in a compromise.
Robert Fritz
Is anything illegal here?' Addison asked.'Library late fines are stiff. Ten lashes a day, and that's just for paperbacks.'There's a library?''Two. Though one won't lend because all the books are bound in human skin and quite valuable.
Ransom Riggs
Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.
Adriana Trigiani
I don't trust people without books or questions.
Darnell Lamont Walker
It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.
Chris Kraus
You're never as good a writer as you think you are, and you're never as bad. Just keep reading and writing, writing, writing.
Don Roff
I believe that if a seven-year old kid has heard of Naked Lunch and is daring enough to want to read it, he’s old enough to read it.
John Waters
Most of my reading is rereading.
Susan Sontag
Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.
Peter Ustinov
If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.
Sherman Alexie
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag
I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?
John Waters
If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?
Chris Kraus
When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it. Because you think that somewhere between sentences and words, the secret will slip out. I am trying to give you that secret; it isn't a secret at all, but it is building solidly, not using secrets. I had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension; that film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite; the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than a single life. My films were built on an incline, an increase in intensity. I hoped to make a form which was infinite, the changingness of things. I thought I would want to find a total form which conveyed that sense, particularly in reference to an Oriental subject. My impression was: one is walking down a corridor of a hotel. One hears a sound, opens a door and a man is playing; one listens for three minutes and closes the door. The music went on before you opened the door and it continues after you close the door. There was neither beginning nor end. Western music increases in intensity to a climax and then resolves itself. Oriental music is infinite; it goes on and on. The Chinese theater goes on for hours and hours with time for lunch moving scenery, etc.
Maya Deren
The map is more interesting than the territory.
Michel Houellebecq
My day begins at dawn as I take my cup of strong black espresso outside to watch the sunrise. I learned this ritual from my mother, who worked in a bread shop. Bakers are the great philosophers of the world, mostly because they have to get up early. When the world is quiet, great art is created - or, at the very least, conceptualized. Now is the moment to sketch, make notes, and dream.
Adriana Trigiani
Who's the artist?""My favorite." She pauses. "Unknown." Edydie sits cross-legged on the couch. "There is something so pure about an artist creating something for the sheer joy of it, then sharing it with people and claiming no credit. To me that's the height of romance.
Adriana Trigiani
In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.
David Byrne
A world that won't forget is a world drowned in its not forgetting. Do we want a world full of unedited memory? To be human is to be finite.
Tacita Dean
Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises
Richard Flanagan
Paris, however―because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements―Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.
Jean Cocteau
I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art.
Andy Warhol
Art is what you get away with
Andy Warhol
I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art. The best art are those dime novels. People will put those books in a museum one day. Artists will make paintings of them. They're beautiful. And for everyone. That's how I want my art to be.
Andy Warhol
As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.
Chris Kraus
We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?
Chris Kraus
When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.
Chris Kraus
If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.
Chris Kraus
With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.
Peter Weiss
The scary part of being an artist is knowing that what makes you a better artist can also kill you.
Darnell Lamont Walker
If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.
Harmony Korine
The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.
Tacita Dean
You know it's ART, when the check clears.
Andy Warhol
The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.
Paul Strand
Art makes the spirit soar. And when the spirit is lifted, life follows.
Adriana Trigiani
Art is sanctioned pornography
Stewart Home
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
Man Ray
We suffered for our art. You have to suffer for our art as well!
Terry Gilliam
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau
But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.
Susan Sontag
The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau
Art is science made clear.
Jean Cocteau
An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
Andy Warhol
The mystery was gone but the amazement was just starting.
Andy Warhol
Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.
Andy Warhol
I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.
Andy Warhol
I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.
David Lynch
Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it.
Frank Zappa
Art is what you can get away with.
Andy Warhol
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
People who copy you will always be one step behind.
Wayne Gerard Trotman