Quotes About Art

But, as any parent in those days would have done, he said I would have to go to art school. As a lover of Cézanne and Van Gogh, I felt that such an academic approach would be a waste of time. Nor was I eager to take another entrance examination.

As the winds of the Great Depression blew across a Japan shaken to the very foundations of her economy, proletarian movements sprang up everywhere, including the field of fine art. At the other extreme was an art movement that advocated escape from the painful realities of the hard times, something that was called, in a sort of pidgin, "eroguro nan-sensu" ("erotic-grotesque nonsense").

Unable to throw myself completely into painting, I explored literature, theater, music and film.

With my head crammed full of art, literature, theater, music and film knowledge, I continued to wander, vainly looking for a place to make use of it.

To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.

For a director, each work he completes is like a whole lifetime. I have lived many whole lifetimes with the films I have made, and I have experienced a different life-style with each one as well.

The result of spending my time on a kind of painting for which I felt no enthusiasm at all was a further, more irrevocable loss of my real desire to paint.

Since I wanted nothing except permission to leave quickly and go to Mr. Tachikawa's house, I applied myself with fervor to copying the teacher's calligraphy. But you can't love what you don't like.

On these occasions I do feel an urge to talk about my work. Nevertheless, I try not to. If what I have said in my film is true, someone will understand.

To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

I like silent pictures and I always have ... I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.

One master those arts for health in mind and body, for the ability to live one's life as courageously, uniquely, and energetically as one wishes!

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Cursing's for the uncreative. They say "Frack! on Battlestar Galactica, and everyone still knows what it means.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

Il poeta trasmette: il comprendere è superfluo.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

The possibility of a musical modernity that was not characterized by sensationalism

If you can't paint a man falling from a five story building before he hits the ground, you will never make a monumental painting.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.