Lena Olin Quotes

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

It's funny, because what happens to me when I read a script, when something grabs hold of me, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises.

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

I view art as an inspirational tool.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I do think the first time you read a script, that gut response is very important, and that probably plants a seed that continues to blossom throughout the whole experience.

The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.

Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor, and it comes alive in a way that you didn't expect.

A visual image in the hand of an artist is merely a tool to trigger a mental image.

I feel like life imitates art, or art imitates life. I always take on roles that I'm passionate about.

The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me - in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I'd take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.

There is something special about being an actor and able to bring somebody's visualisation - director, storywriter and script writer - into life. It is almost like creating a person.

That's what I find so special: when you actually imagine something. But really, when it comes to you in a dream, and then you can bring it to life on the screen, it's very powerful.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

Things shape themselves before my eyes just as a I draw them.

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.

I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.