A. R. Rahman Quotes

A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Movies become art after editing. Instead of just reproducing reality, they juxtapose images of it. That implies expression; that's art.

Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

For me, until I know that the audience really gets what I'm trying to communicate I'm not done.

I became fascinated by the fact that you could translate written material into performance.

Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.

There's something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.

I make a film - and once I've made it, everyone comes along and says 'Ah! This is a film that's political, or social', or whatever. But I'm not telling the story that they see. I made a film, told a story, but I wasn't thinking about exactly what it all meant.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

I'll still make movies for studios, but my editing process will be much further removed from the studio system. Because I don't understand it. I don't understand the whole testing-numbers thing. It is not how I want to make movies. So if that's how they do it, then I don't think I want to do it.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

When you make movies, it's such an important period of time, when you look back at each one of them. You want to be able to say that you did something that was a challenge and that changed you.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

The first movies were made by technicians building their own cameras. Movies became an art when technicians worked on the technique and artists took care of the content.

When you make a piece, one of the interesting things is hearing what other people think about it.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.