Patricia Clarkson Quotes

If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies.

There's good directors and bad directors. Some of the critics are really conscientious and really try to do what they can popularize the work or to explain the work and so on. And then there's the critics who just wants to make a reputation by attacking. Those are the ones I'm not keen on.

I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.

I think as an actor, you're more like a dancer, and you have to use your body. I don't understand all these questions about nudity. It's a nonsense. He's an actor, an artist, so get on with it.

If you don't think a film looks good then that is just a reflection of how bad the artist was that was using the paint that is really good.

Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not critics to their judgment, too?

I like doing commentary. As a filmmaker and film student, I think it's really interesting to hear what a director did and how they figured out how to do things. I often like the technical commentaries myself.

I think as an artist you evoke feeling and change and through that you send a message.

It present to allow me to ask myself questions about what I'm doing. I think that's what visual art does - it either reminds you of something or allows you to question something. I don't know why Robert Motherwell; I love so many different artists.

I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.

There are two parts of me. There's the really critical, film-nerd part of me that loves that, and then there's the part of me where I'm like, "I really didn't like that movie, but I want to work with that director because he loves actors."

I think it's part of everybody's childhood, there are some wonderful Hammer movies and there are some dreadful ones.

I think any actor that says 'I never watch my films' is a liar because you have to watch it at least once and also you're going to watch it when you're doing your ADR.

It's difficult not to color our perception of author's product with his personality. There are so many examples of this. What do we think of Ezra Pound - clearly a great poet and clearly kind of an asshole? You can say the same thing about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who clearly was a Nazi sympathizer, and yet one of the great writers of the 20th century. It is tough, but there are enough examples around where we have to somehow find a way of separating the work from the artist and seeing what there is to see in the work, while also condemning the thoughts we see in the man.

As an actor, you can't judge. A great actress from Spain said, "We, the actors, are lawyers of the characters we play. We have to defend them, no matter what."

It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism. And there's so many expectations involved, too. You're going in to see the latest Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick film, you really have high hopes, and you can't help but find that it's not exactly what you had in your head going in. Until you can watch it again, you can't accept the work for what it intends to be. It takes at least a second viewing.

I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.

I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.

As an artist I am attracted by decadence, by those who exhaust their lives in the shallow pursuits of pleasure. Occasionally, I feel that spiritually I participate in all these kinds of lives.

Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it's my role as an artist to bring to expression, it's not my role to be expressive.

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

I'm being probably naïve, but I would like to think that once something moves you and you have an emotional involvement with it, and you see some relevance in it to your own life, then it's a little bit harder, maybe, to look at the people that produced it as being just exotic others that don't have any connection to you or relevance to you.

An entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself. An artist is on a journey: they don't know where they're going, what is going to happen, but they know they are not there yet, and there is some continuity and growth. I think of myself as an entertainer: I'm a performing entertainer, I'm a stand-up comic. But there's an artist at work here, too. One who interprets his world through his own filter.