Ansel Adams Quotes

I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

The camera can photograph thought.

Imagination is the air of mind.

I visualize things in my mind before I have to do them. It's like having a mental workshop.

I write my books in my head, and not in a specific study with a view. The view is from my inner eyes.

I think when I'm drawing, I'm seeing what's happening on the page almost as if it were unfolding like a movie in my head.

If you see everything through the lens, you are constantly composing pictures. I think in pictures; I don't think in text.

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

It's an imaginative thing we do; it's about immersing oneself in one's imagination. If you're a novelist, you do it with pen and paper. We do it with our bodies.

When I read something, I picture that scene in that detail. That becomes very similar to composing a photo in real life.

When I was 5 years old, I saw people dancing in my head. In college, I would choreograph for the cultural shows, and in my notes, I would actually create formations of people. It was how my whole brain worked.

When I write, I never think of segments as chapters; I think of them as scenes. I always visualize them in my mind. Then I try to get the scene down on paper as closely as I can. That's the one thing that readers don't see - what you have in your mind. The reader can only see what you get on the page.

The moment that you start to read a script, you're watching the movie in your mind, and that's the one moment that you have. Then, you go off to make the movie and you become so lost in it.

If you want to play something that you can't, you need to see and hear yourself doing it in your minds eye. It will start to happen

When I start a film, I can sort of shut my eyes, sit somewhere quiet and imagine the movie finished. I can imagine the camera angles, I can even imagine the type of music. Without knowing the tune, I can imagine the type of music it needs to be.

I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

It's like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it's your mind that allows the words to come to life.

In the case of a film like The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A., I saw the whole movie in my head before I went to shoot it. I never did storyboards, or anything like that. I had the film in my head.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

You must first realize the thing completely in your mind. Then grasp the brush, fix your attention so that you see clearly what you wish to paint; start quickly, move the brush, follow straight what you see before you, as the buzzard swoops down when the hare jumps out. If you hesitate one moment, it is gone.

To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.

If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

If you've written it you know exactly; whoever you're playing if you've written it you already know it. As a matter of fact, you've already made the movie if you wrote it. You've made it in your head.