Jonas Mekas Quotes

I strongly believe cinema is popular culture. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's life.

I had some great times doing competitions, but I have always been more into making movies because making movies is more about art and expressing yourself in a creative way.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.

I've choreographed all of my movies.

When you look at my pictures, you are seeing my life.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.

I feel like at the end of the day, as entertaining as movies are, when you're part of them in a way, it's this beautiful art form and that's what it feels like for me. I'm not a painter, but I can express myself visually in a way that allows me to artistically create.

I make home movies-therefore I live. I live - therefore I make home movies.

I was raised in a family where cinema was a way of life. It was not only about making films, it was relationship, passion, love, everything at the same time.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.

For me, art is always a kind of theater.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

When I paint a picture of a house, that goes back to my roots.

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

Art is my life and my life is art.

The waltz is a very important part of my life. It's a very important way for me to express my positiveness, bringing humor to the world.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

A picture is a poem without words.

Video is freeing, but also lazier. You have to recreate the love of the moment.

My duty is to try to reach beauty. Cinema is emotion. When you laugh you cry.

Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.