Trevor Paglen Quotes

When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

It is important to consider that the horror movies should - like modern art - not have a too obvious meaning. When you watch them, it is more important what you feel than what you understand.

Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.

The first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

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.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

I like endings that let your imagination do a lot of the work.

There is art and beauty and power in the primal images of fantasy.

I want there to be hints of narrative everywhere in the image so that people can make up their own stories about them. But I don't want to have my own narrative and force it on to them.

I realized all the writing I love lives in the gray area.

I always find with dramas that the more that's left to the imagination of the audience, the better.

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us.

One thing that's really important to me in my music is mystery.

I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.