Quotes from Jonas Mekas

In 1962, we created the Filmmakers' Co-Op because nobody wanted to distribute our films. If we had the Internet in those days, we wouldn't have needed the Co-Op.

The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.

In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.

An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.

I make home movies-therefore I live. I live - therefore I make home movies.

Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.

Some cameras are heavier and need to be on tripods. Others are small enough to hide in your pocket. There are places where you don't want to feel like you are disturbing anything, so I may use a camera like that.

I am very active on the Internet. In 2007, I made one film every day and posted it on my website. That was a 365-day project, really exhausting, but I still put a lot of stuff on - from life, friends, my own life.

Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.

In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don't pay attention to it when it happens.

Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life

I have never been able, really, to figure out where my life begins and where it ends. I have never, never been able to figure it all out, what it's all about, what it all means.

I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called 'Film Culture.'

For me, to catch, to celebrate the reality and life and friends and everything around me the very moment it happens - that's what is, that's what I'm possessed by.

When I came to New York in 1949, there was already an entire fresh avant-garde film movement blooming in New York and California. It was a very, very exciting period!

You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.

It is important to know that what I do is not artistic. I am just a film-maker. I live how I live and I do what I do, which is recording moments of my life as I move ahead. And I do it because I am compelled to. Necessity, not artistry, is the true line you can follow in my life and work.

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life.

Kartais aš jau?iuos kaip šuva. Aš prisirišu prie kiekvienos vietos, kurioje aš pasilieku ilgiau negu vien? dien?. Numeskit, sakau, mane dykiausioj dykumoje, palikit mane joje. Gr?ž? po keli? dien? j?s rasite mane jau ?leidus? ? j? šaknis, ? pat? jos vidur?.