John Carpenter Quotes

Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

To David Lynch, any film or television show should be life casting a shadow.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests.

Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

And as a director, you make 1,000 decisions a day, mostly binary decisions: yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. And it's the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film and whether or not it moves people.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

In looking at Hollywood and its structure, the director controls the medium, and I want to be in control of certain things. I want to be able to get my own ideas and my own feelings out there, and the only way to do that is to be behind the camera.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

It's the director's job to piece together my performance, his interpretation of my takes, each take, and string them together and make a statement. I'm red paint on a canvas for a painter.

If you have something to say, a movie is a really great medium to say it. It doesn't matter what the message is.

Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

Film is definitely a director's medium. They're responsible for the look and everything, and you're a part of that process as an actor, and you try to contribute to the story. But I think it might sound a little pretentious for me to say I think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a creative person.

It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.