Stan Brakhage Quotes

When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out - so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don't need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily.

I'd like to give people leaden boots in galleries, so they'd be a bit slower in front of my paintings. And that's because I spend so much time looking at them. I can look at them a long, long time without getting bored. I disappear.

I want to be an artist you cannot categorize at all. You can't put a box around me. You can't put anything around me.

Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious.

Genius is independent of situation.

The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

There's no reason for your imagination to be fettered by money.

Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.

I want to live outside of the box, and I definitely don't want to put God in a box, so I want to be able to dream big and kind of let that go of my small-mindedness.

Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it.

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.

My parents offered me the idea of ceilinglessness. There was no limit in terms of what was possible; no messages sent to me to say that I couldn't do anything.

Don't give me any money, don't give me any people, but give freedom, and I'll give you a movie that looks gigantic.

I mean, the type of art that I enjoy is art that - I enjoy a very broad spectrum, but I especially like art that leaves me a little confused and uncertain as to what just happened.

Viewing abstract art requires more imagination. The result is more intense involvement of the viewer—more pleasurable.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.

I don't paint butter dishes, doilies, or hummingbirds in my garden. It's more raw, I suppose. But it always creates a reaction.

I'm calling the Cube, it's a piece of art. At the same time, it's an intellectual task as well.