Jonas Mekas Quotes

The underground always has the best ideas. Sometimes those underground artists transcend and make it to the mainstream, but most of the time, the big guys just steal from us.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.

Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.

The idea of experimenting with machines to create art was always something I tinkered with.

I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.

Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it.

I have a feeling that in art the need to understand and the need to communicate are one.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

Yes, time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.

I've gotten to the point where I realize that I need to tell my truth in music and not walk around blabbing my mind.

We need to change what we say and what we allow to be said in front of us.

There are a lot of young artists that are dope.

Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to he said? Of course the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.

Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

Music is something I really have a need to do - I don't seem to be able to stop

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.

Todayart is moving in a direction of which our fathers would never even have dreamed.We stand before the new pictures as in a dream and we hear the apocalyptic horsemen in the air.