Jasper Johns Quotes

Life, to me, doesn't feel like a straightforward story; it doesn't make sense for me to get up there and just tell a story. Life feels like what my show feels like: chaotic and strange and disconnected.

I don't know what any of my songs are about. I don't sit down to write about anything. They're about whatever you want. I don't pick subjects. I just start.

No sense makes sense.

History is messy, undetermined, and layered.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

At the end of the day, the end of the movie is sort of ambiguous - it's whatever you want it to be.

I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.

I'm not dating anyone. I don't even know where I am half of the time.

The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it." - Socrates

We are living in a dynamic age with multiple ideas and beliefs of correctness; this world is not deterministic and not still.

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.

Sometimes I have no idea whats going on

The world is this incredibly blurry, crazy dream that I'm just sort of stumbling through.

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

In a world like this one, only the random makes sense.

To feel the anguish of waiting for the next moment and of taking part in the complex current (of affairs) not knowing that we are headed toward ourselves, through millions of stone beings - of bird beings - of star beings - of microbe beings - of fountain beings toward ourselves.

By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is. -- Ev Hillman

I have complete faith in the continued absurdity of whatever’s going on.

Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.

Life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward ... Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.

The audience seems hazy to me, shrouded in a veil through which I can't see.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.