Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

68 quotes in 1083 categories

• If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want…
• A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he’s worth something. And…
• Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.
• Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid…
• Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of…
• When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that…
• Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards.' In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should…
• Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema…
• An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that…
• I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.
• For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged by an overriding passion.
• The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute…
• The meaning of religious truth is hope
• An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty
• The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim…
• It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.
• History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the…
• Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.
• A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.
• Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free.

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