Carl Jung Quotes

Music is the can-opener of the soul.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

I have skipped from style to style from film to film, and I love doing that because it's given me the ability to free myself from the past. Perhaps one of the worst feelings that I can have is the feeling that I'm locked in, like a prisoner of myself, which is something we all feel at some point in our lives. So part of making those stylistic jumps is just to free myself up-to get away from the old or the old Oliver Stone.

It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

I love costume dramas, I love performing in them, because in a funny kind of way, you feel more free. You know about the period, you can read the books, you can see the paintings, but you've never actually going to know what it was like. You can kind of stretch those boundaries a bit.

Imagination is like a lofty building reared to meet the sky; whereas fancy is a balloon that soars at the wind's will.

To seek Divinity merely in books is to seek the living among the dead... seek God within your own soul.

I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.

The fun thing we get to do is mess around playing all sorts of different people. People that really existed, people that exist in a book - whom people love and have a specific idea of who they are, and you kind of have to work with that - or people that you can take a completely fresh look at.

For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.

Because you're delegated to a cook book recipe and you slavishly and pedantically rely on it while you're shooting and you're not relying on your creative instincts and you're not relying on something which brings life into movies and excitement into it.

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.

Cartooning is an artistic commitment that requires the full attention and passion of the artist on every level; one should not get into it if one expects to do anything more than produce a book or a story that is exactly as one wants it to be.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.

There was one moment, and it happened in school. I had a big final exam - we were supposed to write a 20-page report on this book about Houdini. I probably would have loved reading it, but I didn't, so I just decided to make a little super-8 movie based on it. I tied myself to the railroad tracks and all that. I mean, this is kid stuff, but it impressed the teacher, and I got an A. And that was maybe my first turning point, when I said, 'Yeah, I wouldn't mind being a filmmaker.'

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. ... Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute.

There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.

You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.

We cannot by a little verbal sophistry confound the qualities of different minds, nor force opposite excellences into a union by all the intolerance in the world. If we have a taste for some one precise style or manner, we may keep it to ourselves and let others have theirs. If we are more catholic in our notions, and want variety of excellence and beauty, it is spread abroad for us to profusion in the variety of books and in the several growth of men's minds, fettered by no capricious or arbitrary rules.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.