Quotes from Stan Brakhage

The capacity to be intrinsic and vulgar is American.

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'

I love being objected to. It worries me, but I love being objected to.

Poetry is a totally different art than film.

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "green"?

Art is a sense of magic.

If only, then, I had been more living out of the present--such a beautiful word...present. The sense of it being, now to me, more beautiful than 'to look forward.

No one is out to get you. It's just that... people are monkeys.

How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?

Art is a sense of magic.

I've always believed film is most close to music of all the other arts.

Poetry is a totally different art than film.