Juergen Teller Quotes

It sometimes feels like a strange movie, you know, it's all so weird that sometimes I wonder if it is really happening.

A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.

The circus allows one to be logical and unreal at the same time. In the circus, all is possible: there can be a man with two heads or a character with a green face.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

I realized that everything I do is fantasy, whether it is an adult movie or a kids movie.

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

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

It's all make believe, isn't it?

Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.

I show elements of the set in my pictures because it's not real. When I see movies, I often love the 'making of' more than the movie itself. It's not so final. When you have a woman just standing there, it doesn't mean much.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

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

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

If you're going to establish a certain level of unreality than you have to deal with it.

Film is a window to the real world but a lie that makes you believe the unbelievable.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.