Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens.

Unspoken feelings are unforgettable.

Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time.

I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.

My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness.

Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

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 human soul.

Being silent for a while is good. Words can't really express a person's emotions.

Where am I when I'm not in reality or in my imagination?

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual...

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free.

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.

Never try to convey your idea to the audience - it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

Art would be useless if the world were perfect.

We have forgotten to observe. Instead of observing, we do things according to patterns.

Objectivity can only be the author's and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel.

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 to collect their money.

The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry.

Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.

An artist who has no faith is like a painter who was born blind.

Never trouble anyone else with what you can do yourself

The only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.

"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 we be able to "fly upwards".

People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

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 would have no need for music at all.

For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged by an overriding passion.

IN CINEMA IT IS NECESSARY NOT TO EXPLAIN, BUT TO ACT UPON THE VIEWER'S FEELINGS, AND THE EMOTION WHICH IS AWOKEN IS WHAT PROVOKES THOUGHT.

I am convinced that any attempt to restore harmony in the world can only rest on the renewal of personal responsibility.

An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.

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 his abstention will not appear artificial or false.

ALL ART, OF COURSE, IS INTELLECTUAL, BUT FOR ME, ALL THE ARTS, AND CINEMA EVEN MORE SO, MUST ABOVE ALL BE EMOTIONAL AND ACT UPON THE HEART.

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

The Stalker seems to be weak, but essentially it is he who is invincible because of his faith and his will to serve others.

Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities.

It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.

The meaning of religious truth is hope.

I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.

My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware the beauty is summoning him.

Knowledge is truthful only if it’s based in morality.

We know perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any currency.

Masterpieces, not always distinguished or distinguishable among all the works with pretensions to genius, are scattered about the world like warning notices in a mine field.

No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision, and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time.

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.