Genndy Tartakovsky Quotes

I watched a lot of avant-garde films, like Maya Deren's work, and I love film's technical ability to do things that are impossible in real life. It's related to the way collage allows you to manipulate reality and the hierarchies that are inherent in our awful but amazing world.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

I get to experiment with a lot of looks with my character so that's really fun for me. It's like getting to paint a new canvas everyday.

I want to change things with everything I do, not for the sake of changing things, but for the sake of taking greater and greater risks, or how minimalist I might be able to be, or how I can involve elements or ingredients in music videos that are not musical, for instance.

I consider all my films experiments.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

There's a good many pictures I'd like to make; we'll see how many I'll be allowed to make.

You never know what an artist is going to create next.

Film has the potential of allowing me to explore my own ideas, which I find very attractive.

I think everything's fair in art and how you perceive a character.

The whole point of film for me is that it's such a joy. It's such a wonder. The possibilities are literally endless in terms of what you can creatively do.

It has nothing to do with commercial success. You cannot calculate in your head how to put the mosaic together to make a commercial film: that's out of the question.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

People ask, like, 'How are you going to incorporate what you do onstage into everything else?' I'm not too worried about that. Whether it's theater or a TV show idea, or an animated thing or, I don't know, an animated screensaver. I really just want to keep creating things. And I've always been able to do that.

As an artist, you find at different times you want to do different things.

I've always had an explorative drive to my art, as opposed to wanting to achieve some certain goal.

I love being with artists because I'm always open to getting into something.

My pictures are about getting as far away from reality as possible. Dreams should be part of our everyday life.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

When I was living in Mexico, I started reassessing my drawing style, and plunged into a period of doing exercises and research to develop a new way to draw. The result was a style that implies more than it shows, and so, ironically, feels more "true" to the scene I want to draw than a style that is more specific. It seems to me that the reader's imagination is able to fill in the gaps more effectively than I ever could. Plus it's a lot faster and more fun to do.