Albert Camus Quotes

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

People have to find ways of explaining the work.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

The medium is not the message - the message is the message.

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.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

Symbols are important.

A picture can say a thousand words but maybe not the correct ones.

Translation is an act of recreation.

I think, as human beings, we all have a fundamental mode, a basic way of relating to the rest of reality, and for me, it's always instinctively been about sound making and trying to extract information, grammar, meaning from sound making. That's been my way of navigating reality that's very personal; a painter might say they make marks or look.

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.