Quotes from Abbas Kiarostami

Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.

Whenever people ask me what the story is for my next film, I won't tell and people feel it's because I'm being secretive or something, but it's actually because I'm ashamed to sum up a film in three sentences.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

The calling of art is to extract us from our daily reality, to bring us to a hidden truth that's difficult to access - to a level that's not material but spiritual.

I didn't just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.

I was mentioning with the digital camera, maybe this new fashion of filmmaking gives a closer look of what life may be like. But it's still nothing but a copy.

A good movie is made by an initial burst of energy, the way that, when you are in school, your class exercises are always better than your final projects.

I think life is so difficult to catch, it's so furtive, that a copy, a film, can in no way catch it and represent it.

In real life, when someone's partner calls them, they can tell from the first word their partner says what their mood is.

This [the earthquake] was a very big influence on me, and the issue of life and death from then on does recur in my films.

Usually when I take my films to festivals, I feel incredibly anxious about them. I wonder how it will be received, how the audience will react. I feel deeply responsible for them.

I spend a lot of time doing carpentry. Sometimes there is nothing that gives me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does.

I think Woody Allen is Woody Allen, and no matter where he goes he still makes his Woody Allen films.

Close-Up is a very particular film in my oeuvre. It's a film that was made in a very particular way; mainly because I didn't really have the time to think about how to go about making the film.

The world is my workshop. It is not my home.

I really haven't seen The Report in a long time. I don't have a copy, but I'll have to see it again. I think it would be good to put both these men next to each other.

I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.

Digital photography is, by definition, unfinished. You don't feel that after every 24 or 36 shots you have to change your film - you know you can go on for ever if you want. You can see the result immediately, and find out if your original idea is worth going on with or not, whether it can be corrected, whether it can be improved.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.

The experience of life teaches us that being like someone in love is more real, because everything is uncertain.

All the different nations in the world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life, still have one thing in common, and that is what's inside of all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human beings, we wouldn't be able to tell from those X-rays what the person's language or background or race is.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated.