Jarvis Cocker Quotes

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

Draw what you see.

One does not photograph something simply for 'what it is', but 'for what else it is.

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Different directors offer you different things, and it's not necessarily the most obvious things.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Going to directing wasn't a reaction away from acting as much as it was a move towards something I always wanted to do. Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in the camera and how it worked and why one director would place it in this part of the room and then another would place it in that part of the room.

I guess I have a fascination with the idea of puppeteering. I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do.

I'm not the guy who does slo-mo, or I'm not the guy who does splashing rain or doves flying or anything; that's not me. Every film, I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.

I don't think there is a movie that I've been on that I wasn't sure I could direct it better. But certainly also, as a director of photography, I have to serve the movie in whatever way I can as a filmmaker.

I am not interested in representing reality. Actually, I am interested in representing reality, but that doesn't mean a naturalistic approach, which I think is kind of impossible.

A lot of cinematography is intuition. It's an art, not a formula.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.