Atom Egoyan Quotes

Working with Tim Burton is like a psychic experience -Tim waves his hands and says, 'I don't know,' and you go home and do it. He's the most articulate nonverbal person in the world. He doesn't say a word, and you know exactly what it means.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

I can't do pieces I only admire technically. I have to feel some direct contact with them.

Mostly what I try to do is build emotion. Only I'd prefer not to do it by telling you about emotion but by pushing that emotion down.

Commercial movies have no feeling, no sensitivity. Most people tell me people won't understand films with feeling. But everyone can feel.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

All the best art and music feels like some type of truth - even if it's really simple - that you just can't deny. A listener can feel that.

Sometimes the music will tell you where to go. And when you find that place I believe is when you're just connecting to the feelings and the heart and the people you're with.

When you engage with people as an artist you know exactly what they feel and what they're thinking.

What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.

I just see potential in things that aren't there and how it's going to make you feel. Like, if it makes me feel a certain way, I try and create the vibe of how that felt to me. And try and create it for someone else.

Music should resonate with people on an emotional level. That's one of the criterions I use for an idea. Does it speak simply and directly without obfuscation and without being unnecessarily complex or obscure?

Music bypasses the conceptual mind. Music does not give you food for thought.

No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.

Music is an experience, not a science.

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

Everyone has the attitude that movies aren't just disposable entertainment - they can really mean something. I love that, because that's the way I feel about films.

I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.

In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.

What use having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?