Jim Jarmusch Quotes

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

I guess that in this process of trying to incorporate or to be faithful to the films I admire so much, that's how I start to find my own voice. The admiration I have for filmmakers, this gratitude, perhaps that's my only way to become specific.

Twelve years on sets watching directors, I've taken a bit from everybody and rejected a lot.

When you get to work with people like Ian McKellen or directors like Peter Jackson, you sit and watch.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

Looking back now, if I went to film school, it probably would have helped knowing what the best of the best of foreign films were, but that wasn't the case. In some ways, I think that led to my originality, because I hadn't seen anybody else.

Frida Kahlo taught me a lot without ever bragging about anything.

I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.

In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative....the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

When I'm drawing a bottle or a town or a market, I transport myself there. So I start drawing everything that I'm looking at while I'm there. Here's a guy selling the meat, and he will have a hook, and you start adding things, and it's a lot of fun.

At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer...I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

The artist's life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Wow, I wish I could have done something like that.” That’s the thing, with other filmmakers, if I like them I just feel admiration. And yes, I usually say, “I wish I could have been part of that creative process,” because the films I admire like that are so specific that I know the creative process is also so specific, it’s nothing you could just imitate.

Filmmaking is to me very similar to being in a café somewhere in Paris and looking at the people walking by.

Writing is really wonderful art. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job as writers is to just notice them and bring them to life.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

One of the things about Derek Jarman was that he was a painter who worked alone when he painted, but I firmly believe that one of the reasons he made films was for the company. He made filmmakers of all of us, that's the truth. I don't mean he necessarily made directors, but he made us filmmakers. Because we lived in a state of mutual responsibility for what we made.

I'm learning about filming, and just conceptualizing as well. I think it's a good artistic inroad, even to music as well.