Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

If there are some who talk the same language as myself, then why should I neglect their interests for the sake of some other group of people who are alien and remote? they have their own 'gods and idols' and we have nothing in common. [...] 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

Andrei Tarkovsky
What nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment it is nothing.

Andrei Tarkovsky
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.

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

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

Andrei Tarkovsky
Freedom is inseparable from conscience. And even if it is true that all the ideas developed by the social conciousness are the product of evoolution, conscience at least has nothing to do with the historic process. Conscience, both as a sense and as a concept, is a priori immanent in man, and shakes the very foundations of the society that has emerged from our ill-conceived civilisation.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Joy is lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Time is such a simple, almost primitive idea. It is just a means of material differentiation, a way of uniting us all; for in our external, material lives we value the synchronized efforts of individual people.

Andrei Tarkovsky
A person fulfils his duty to society in the name of an idea, always doing violence to someone or something.

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

Andrei Tarkovsky
I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms. Certainly I am more at home with them than with traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear rigid logical development of plot. That sort of fussily correct way of linking events usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when the plot is governed by the characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life's complexities.

Andrei Tarkovsky
It seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroads, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the existence of blind consumer, subject to the implacable march of new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a new way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, to turn to God.

Andrei Tarkovsky
"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".

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

Andrei Tarkovsky
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 is only attainable through faith and in the creative act.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition — otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

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

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

Andrei Tarkovsky
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.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

Andrei Tarkovsky
The film 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

Andrei Tarkovsky
Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

Andrei Tarkovsky
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.

Andrei Tarkovsky
All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love.

Andrei Tarkovsky
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.

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

Andrei Tarkovsky
I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.

Andrei Tarkovsky
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.

Andrei Tarkovsky
[About Mirror] I had the greatest difficulty in explaining to people that there is no hidden, coded meaning in the film, nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth. Often my assurances provoked incredulity and even disappointment. Some people evidently wanted more: they needed arcane symbols, secret meanings. They were not accustomed to the poetics of the cinema image. And I was disappointed in my turn. Such was the reaction of the opposition party in the audience; as for my own colleagues, they launched a bitter attack on me, accusing me of immodesty, of wanting to make a film about myself.

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

Andrei Tarkovsky