Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the 'dirt' of the world. On the contrary! the artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution... the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

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.

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

Art imitating life and life imitating art, and it's beyond the job - it will always be a marked period in my life.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

All art is erotic. The first ornament to have been invented, the cross, was of erotic origin. It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down. A vertical stroke: the male who penetrates her.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.

All good art is about something deeper than it admits.

I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.

My work sanitizes it (emotion) but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I think it can be read that way.... People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it's really the position of line that's important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.

It's the emotion...each word has got a connotation and symbolism and the thing is finding what's behind the word-what meaning it has and what emotion. I'm really into vocal repetition as a definite art form.