Jasper Johns Quotes

Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.

I like the saying: "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same - the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds - every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with.

What is true for you is what you have observed yourself. And when you lose that, you have lost everything.

I don't expect everyone to get something deep out of it. Some people can just listen to the music, or get their aggressions out, but I think with any great painting or movie, album or whatever it is, it's better if people can take what they need from it. That they're not forced to get some particular message.

I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.

I was the world in which I walked.

It doesn't have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see.

Maybe I'm seeing myself in a different way than the people in the audience see me, 'cause to me, I think I look like a ballerina and I feel like a ballerina. But maybe I'm not seeing what other people are seeing.

I think I don't view myself as an author. I view myself as a person. I view anything as part of being a person, so I feel okay with "marketing" or other things like that.

I don't think I'm better than other people, I think I'm different from other people, because I do different things.

Oh, but there's such a difference between saying a thing yourself and hearing other people say it,' wailed Anne. 'You may know a thing is so, but you can't help hoping other people don't quite think it is.

It's always interesting to me to see people projecting things, like people would say, "This record is much more mature than your other record" and I would think, "Well, this record has more songs from when I was 18 on it than the other one."

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities.

I think when you're writing from your own life, it's hard because you realize that people have their own assessment of how they look, and they don't know how you will describe them.

I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society's image of old people and 'us' as we know and feel ourselves to be.

A good song to one person could just be something mediocre to somebody else. It's always strange thinking about how songs connect with people.

It's very odd to observe someone else taking your identity into their own hands and getting it all wrong. I don't think most people will ever get to experience how truly weird it is.

We're constantly being told what other people think we are, and that's why it is so important to know yourself.

I think people hear the question they want to hear.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

When people come up to me expecting me to be just like what they thought a Beatle would be, they're disappointed. I never was a Beatle, except musically. I don't think any of us was. What is a Beatle anyway? I'm not a Beatle or an ex-Beatle or even the George Harrison. I'm just a man. Very ordinary.

When I see people talking on the internet about me or my work it's almost always more a description of themselves and so I never really think of myself as anything more than just who I always was.

When people say "What do you want people to get from this movie?" I say, "Well, it depends on what they bring to it." I don't try to decide what people should get from it or why. I don't do a part for those kinds of reasons.

This book, when I am dead, will be A little faint perfume of me. People who knew me well will say, She really used to think that way.