Andre Kertesz Quotes

When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

Music is feeling. You can try to verbalize it. It really just hits you or it doesn't.

Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

Songwriting isn't always something that's directly proportionate to the experience.

I don't think you can figure this stuff out. If you could figure all this stuff out, then all the great filmmakers would come out of Yale and Harvard. It's not an intellectual process.

Cinematography is so much about instinct and intuition - you want the same range of experience going into behind the camera as what you see in front of it. Your life experience will come through the lens.

When you're trying to create imagery, you're trying to create a feeling or a mood.

I don't deal in technique. I deal in emotions.

The most important thing is to keep creating and following my inklings as they come into being and acting on them.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't want to see it... I had to start in the dark.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

Atmosphere in a painting is nine-tenths fear.

Painting is more important than art.

To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.

I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes.

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

Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.

It is not half so important to know as to feel.

Let passion be your muse. Let her guide and teach you to trust your instincts.

There's not much you can do about time - it just keeps on passing. But experience? Don't tell me that. I'm not proud of it, but I don't have any sexual desire. And what sort of experience can a writer have if she doesn't feel passion? It'd be like a chef without an appetite.