Travis Knight Quotes

I love film and TV, the medium of them, just because it's such a smaller screen. It's much more precise. Ideally, I'd like to do maybe a film a year of some sort and use that to work more in the theatre because theatre really is my first love.

I feel that all good art is powerful and simple.

I've worked with a lot of directors, some of them you wouldn't really attach the word 'artist' to their name.

Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.

It is a peculiar art form, but I think it's a necessary art form - and I do believe it's a noble art form.

For me, art has to have two things to really blow me away: a strong concept and drama.

It's far better to shoot a good picture than a good-looking picture.

In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that's absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children's books. In Japan, everything is art. They don't say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.

People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.

A piece of sculpture has to be more than a block of wood.

Language, I think, has nothing to do with film-making. It is how you make your point and whether you exploit the visual medium maintaining a certain standard that does the trick.

Movie, being an art form, should have artistic value and should do justice to the artistes.

The visual elements of the videos, the makeup and the costumes... these things have nothing to do with justice and truth, but nonetheless, it really changes the experience of the video.

I don't think the audience goes and thinks of the movie as a piece of art - there are some independent people who may go and have a higher appreciation for filmmaking. It is a great art form, but I don't think you look at a painting and a movie with the same eye.

A picture lives by its legend - not by anything else.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.

The only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.

...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

A comic is a way of literally experiencing someone else's vision with a purity that I don't think any other medium offers; there are no technical, electronic or financial limitations; one only has to work harder to improve. Lately I think a new attitude has prevailed that comics aren't inherently an Art form, but that some cartoonists are genuinely artists.

As for a picture, if it isn't worth a thousand words, the hell with it.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.