Laurie Lee Quotes

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

I never took a photograph. Instead, I became a good listener.

A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

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.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.

Just to get the basic fundamentals and empathy - I think that's the most important thing to bring to it if you've acted in the past and are now a director: the empathy.

I see myself as a witness to humanity.

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

So I wanted to explore all points of view of that, not just the girl's but his point of view as well. Only by directing it could I explore all the points of view.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

My pictures are my eyes. I photograph what I see - and what I want to see.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I feel that as artists - whatever your medium is - I feel that we're watching what goes on around us and we take what we don't see, or we don't hear, or we don't feel and we do something that speaks of it; more about it, for it, or against it - whatever our perspective is - that's what our job is.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

One of the reasons I write is to be in other people's skin.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

I'm fascinated with what an audience will take away from an image.