Virginia Woolf Quotes

All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil.

With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.

I live, therefore I make films. I make film, therefore I live. Life. Movement. I make home movies, therefore I live. I live, therefore I make home movies.

I strongly believe cinema is popular culture. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's life.

As a child, play, drawing, and painting were important to me - they still are.

Without electricity, there can be no art.

I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927)

I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.

The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.

I always wanted to play music, but my family was more interested in handing me paints and markers. Art was always my favorite subject in school, and I can remember staying up all night drawing as a small child. My expression via art was extremely strong as I grew and hasn't stopped.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.

Art is a self-replicating force.

For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.

I think it should be ambitious and good music does deal with life and art and all these wonderful things.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.

I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

All of my heroes, like Dali, are people who pioneered various forms of cinema.

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

It's a really cool time for artists who want to strive for a little more depth in what they want to say to come forward. We live in a very fast world right now. We've got all this media and music which is so accessible to us, it's here one minute gone the next.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

I live cinema and passionately love music, and my efforts in both these crafts are unfolding.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?