Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

I never try to guess what anyone else will take from a movie. Every movie is such a different experience for each and every person. I don't like it when people try telling people what they should take from a movie. You should go see it with fresh eyes and see for themselves.

No two persons ever read the same book.

If you're going to have more than one person read your book, they're going to have totally different opinions and responses. No person - no two people - read the same book.

Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

That's the magic of books. They're never quite the same for any two people. When you read one, you automatically make it your own.

Songs are about whatever you want them to be about. For me it might mean something completely different than what it means to you. So I'd say it's about whatever the listener thinks it's about.

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

I want to suggest a feeling. It's ridiculous to assume you can state an opinion. Somebody else can never relate to the lyric in the same way because their whole experience is different. You can only suggest, then people add their own history and experience to the lyrics.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

I think myself that, rather like books, music is meant to enter into the brain, well via your ears rather than your eyes but, it's - I think a lot more should be left to the imagination.

It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.

The world is how we see the world. Some people see the world good, the other people see the world bad. Every person has an idea of the world with a subjective [viewpoint].

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

If I sing "you broke my heart, you left me flat," everyone knows exactly what that means - they know the story. But if I sing a line that's plaintive or wailing, people can experience their own set of emotions and their own story. Each of us might give that phrase a different meaning. It's open to interpretation, and one song becomes a thousand songs. I love that.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don't like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people's ability to understand something if I say it's "about this." That's happened to us a bunch on this.

I read the book and I think, "Well, this is the movie we're going to make," and then someone else reads it, and they take a completely different movie from it. And both are valid.

I'm not presumptuous enough to feel that people are going to feel what I have in mind, so I tell a story, you know, let them read something, that doesn't change, that as I have said it, you know, so that's the way I feel about the viewer, the viewer has a mind of their own and eyes of their own and they're going to see it their way, I just hope they look.