Conceptual Exploration Quotes

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.

Your ideas need not have anything to do with reality. Making conclusions is a sure way of not enhancing our perception.

I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.

I am rather like a travelling salesman. I deal in ideas. I do much more for people than just paint them pictures.

People are more interested in ideas than dress.

It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.

I never sat down and wrote, but what I do is kind of act as a dramaturge for the piece. I am sitting with the writers. I'm discussing ideas with the writers and concepts. We're debating and having a dialectic where we are taking a lot of different ideas and trying to synthesize them into the right idea. I'm very much a part of that process. That's my job as the director.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.

We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn't exist. But in this way, these projects reveal their identity through this whole process. When I'm starting, I only have the slightest idea of how the work of art will exist.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

Directing doesn't appeal to me. I'm much more in the world of ideas.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true...what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.

The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

I am a storyteller, and I do love ideas.

Summer's the same, autumn is even more extreme. Then winter is when you sort of condense all of your ideas. You process all these things and you try to look for new concepts. In that sense, your intuition is in hibernation. What you fill up is your imagination; you fill up your memories there.

Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.

Writing about an idea frees me of it. Thinking about it is a circle of repetitions.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

I try to operate on two unconnected levels. One on the practical level of action in which I am extremely cautious and conservative. The second is the realm of ideas where I try to be very free

I found the material that people hated the most and used the most. So, I was going and try and see if I could play with it sculpturally.