Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

The trouble with a lot of artists today is that they have too much technique and equipment. They don't know what to do with it all. If you cut down on it, you can work more strongly within narrower limits.

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

I'm a minimalist at heart. If a song doesn't need a solo, I'm not going to force one into it.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him. ... The model will serve equally for a Rembrandt drawing or for anybody's magazine cover. A genius is one who can see. The others can often 'draw' remarkably well. ... Those who get their technique first, expecting sight to come to them later, get a technique of a very ready-made order.

What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act 'voluntarily' and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height - in short, that necessity and 'freedom of will' are then one in them.

Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

Don't give up. It's really important to trust your impulses as an artist no matter what anybody else says.

Great artists need great clients.

One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colourist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art - and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois.

A lot of artists need structure.

And yet the artist will go on with his work without knowing in some way if any of his representations are sound or unsound. The artist knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents, and that art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously.

Artists are the best theologians. They feel things that are true before theologians can jargonize them into obscurity.

I have heard it very often said that an artist does not need intelligence, that his is the province of the soul

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

Real artists find answers. The knowledge of the artisan is within the confines of his skills. For example, I know a lot about lenses, about the editing room. I know what the different buttons on the camera are for. I know more or less how to use a microphone. I know all that, but that's not real knowledge. Real knowledge is knowing how to live, why we live, things like that.

you don't need talent to be an artist. 'Artist' is just a frame of mind. Anybody can be an artist, anybody can communicate if they are desperate enough.

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.