Alejandro Jodorowsky Quotes

Although often with good intentions, our parents and teachers attribute negative definitions to us, which last for many years and prevent us from developing ourselves with pleasure. In psychomagic, we call these definitions "labels" because they stick to the self. So that the consultant can free herself from them, I advise:
▶ The consultant writes on adhesive labels as many definitions as they gave her, for example: "You have no ear for music," "You don't know how to use your hands," "You're a freeloader, liar, thief," "You're egotistical, weak, dumb, fat, skinny, vain, ungrateful," and so on. The consultant glues these labels to every part of the body - many of them to the face - and goes out in public that way for as many hours as possible. When the consultant returns home, she should remove the labels, roll them into a ball, take the ball to the city dump, and throw it on top of the garbage pile, having beforehand caressed her body with hands soaked in pleasant perfume.

Words don't heal. Art heals!

A true artist is always out of his time.

I've seen 'Hamlet' many times, and Hamlet, he was just a hideous neurotic; he never changes. He doubts - all the way to the end, all the way until when he dies, he doubts.

I liked Lady Gaga's meat dress. It was funny.

I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal.

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.

I am not a commercial industry creator. I don't believe in making art to make money.

We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.

I understand. Seraphim, I hope you know you have a great talent. You are a real artist. What you did in the dining room has a deep meaning. It is, no more or less than the very picture of life as it is lived by all of us poor mortals. We try to sweeten it, but the agreeable part stays on the outside because life is always bitter within.

To be an artist, you need to play inside your work.

Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating ...
... Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken's foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.

We are all working for the immortality of the human consciousness.

Sometimes in those moments of greatest abandonment when we feel utterly deserted a sign appears where we least expect it and shows us the way. Those who dare to advance into darkness, expecting nothing, will at last find their shining goal. On a page torn from a book, which an autumn wind blew around my feet, I read the words that showed me I was on the right path: "The initiate who sets out in good faith to find the Truth, only to find, on all sides, the inexorable barrier that throws him back into the 'ordinary tumult,' will hear the Master say: 'Watch out, there is a wall.' 'But is this wall temporary?' asks the restless soul, 'can I pass through it or demolish it? Is it an adversary? Is it a friend?' 'I cannot tell you. You must discover it for yourself.

My ideal audience is on the young side, eager to mutate and move to a higher level of consciousness. I want my images to turn the viewer's brain into what it is: a flying carpet.

Humanity are not individuals; we are collective. And if we have difference, we have wars all the time. We have crisis. We need to open our mind. This is the only solution we have.

I am a victim. To be an artist is to be a victim, because if you don't do what you want to do you die. That is the reality.

The consultant buys a bottle of fake blood at a theater supply store and once every lunar month, for four days, imitates having a period by putting some of this blood into the vagina and preventing it from gushing out by using a tampon. After repeating this for four months, the consultant's period will return to normal.

When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don't do it.

My second wife, the mother of one of my sons, died of murder. I was not with her, but I could have saved her. I think.

The Arabs have a God, the Jews have another, and the Catholics have another! And they're all fighting to maintain that they worship the one real God. Idiots!

We only have problems we really want to have.

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.

It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.

When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair.

I say, 'If somebody steals something of yours, then it's good; he loves what you do.'

I realized once again that what I believed myself to be was an arbitrary deformation, a rational mask floating in the infinite unexplored internal shadows. Later, I understood that diseases do not actually sicken us; they sicken what we believe ourselves to be. Health is achieved by overcoming prohibitions, quitting paths that are not right for us, ceasing to pursue imposed ideals, and becoming ourselves: the impersonal consciousness that does not define itself.

The end of the surrealism movement was so political, so artistically pure.

I have always thought that, of all the arts, the cinema is the most complete art.

Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.

During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington's beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o'clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again.

My ego every day is more and more polite. I tame it.

I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

Today a picture has value if it makes a lot of money. Myself, I declare I want to make a picture to lose money. Really! I want to lose money.

One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.

When you find love, real love, it's like a catastrophe, like a tsunami. Like an earthquake, because all your individuality, all what you believed you are, it's breaking. And you are completely another person. You never know what you were. And it's a catastrophe –– but a good catastrophe, not a bad catastrophe.

I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life.

Your true homeland is the universe.
Your true goal is to be yourself
Your true love is the love of life.
Your true power is your powerto help.
Your true happiness is to enjoy what you do.
Your true work is to create beauty.
Your true magic is to develop your attention.
Your true social action is to liberate consciences.
Your true discipline is to tame your ego.
Your true truth "The others are also me

I am like the rain: I go where I'm needed.

George Harrison wanted to play the thief in 'Holy Mountain.'

Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal.

In movies, images cost - if you want a big image, it takes more money.

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.

When the bull's-eye becomes as big in your mind as an elephant, you are sure to hit it.

The world is how we see the world. Some people see the world good, the other people see the world bad. Every person has an idea of the world with a subjective [viewpoint].

You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.

A person is not the same in his life at all times. Your consciousness is developing all the time. When I started making 'El Topo,' I was one person. When I finished that picture, I was another person.

Failure doesn't mean anything, it just means changing paths.

If art is not a medicine for the society, it is a poison.

Oh, Buenos Aires, I have traveled around the world, but I've never been separated from you," said Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. And Saint Thomas said, "A friendship that can end has never been a true friendship." In

The imagination wants to construct the new worlds, no? Creativity is a solution. If I ask you, "What is your goal in life? How many years do you have to live before to die? How many years do you have? And what you will do with these years you have?" You have pressure there. "How you will realize a good life? How? Tell me!" Then, you start to open your mind.

I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. 'I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.' I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, 'This is me! This is me!'

I never wanted to study art. And I don't think you need to study art if you are an artist. It's even dangerous to go to school. You need to do whatever you want, as you want.

I had a big problem working with stars, because they are too expensive and have too many demands. Their names help you raise the money to make the movie, but then they demand close-ups. They change things. You end up doing things at their service instead of servicing the film.

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture.

I think Twitter is the literature of the 21st century. I think it's an incredible art because when you make a book, you don't know who reads it. But every line, I write a million people, they read it, and then they insult me, they love me, they discuss, they give an opinion instantly, immediately. They are completely in communication, immediately. That is a real art.

Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.

If the picture is not an artistic picture, it's show, like television. Television series are very funny, but it's a collective production. An industrial art. A car is not made by a person, it's made by a group of creators, only to go to the market to buy your cigarettes. That is a car - they are not a big art, they are a little art.

Art gives to you a new conception of reality, opens your mind, opens your heart, opens your desire of action.

We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.

Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life.

I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I don't believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too old now; it's from another century, it's not for today.

'Santa Sangre' is the picture I love the best, myself, because 'El Topo' and 'The Holy Mountain' I made with my head, and 'Santa Sangre' I made with my feelings, with my heart. It's an emotional picture. And it's more real for me, that picture.

Every mind has another vision of reality. There is not a common reality. Every person thinks he is like the others, but every person is different, living in his own psychology.

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

Scientific thought and the miraculous unconscious are two waves in the same ocean.

If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.

One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.

Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.

You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.

A man doesn't cry. In my life, I've never cried. I cannot do it. I am a man. How will I cry?

The worse the newspapers speak of the world, the better I feel.

My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.

I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.

Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture.

My grandfather was a very mystical guy who travelled from Argentina to Chile, across the mountains with a donkey, carrying the Torah.

For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.

I always think that art is a form of sacrifice.

In Chile, they have no movies. They have awful popular movies.

Death is an art, you know.

It's not enough to quote someone; it's important to specify what aspect of that person you're referencing. Every time we talk about someone, we speak of that person as if our perception is the same for everyone. When

Miracles are like stones: they are everywhere, offering up their beauty, but hardly anyone concedes value to them. We live in a reality where prodigies abound but are seen only by those who have developed their perception of them. Without this perception everything is banal, marvelous events are seen as chance, and one progresses through life without possessing the key that is gratitude. When something extraordinary happens it is seen as a natural phenomenon that we can exploit like parasites, without giving anything in return. But miracles require an exchange; I must make that which is given to me bear fruit for others. If one is not united with oneself, the wonder cannot be captured. Miracles are never performed or provoked: they are discovered. If someone who believes himself to be blind takes off his dark glasses, he will see the light. That darkness is the prison of the rational.

When I'm tired, I see industrial pictures. But I'll see one every two months. If I see one every day, I'll become an idiot.

Life is beautiful, what do you think? In the morning I say, 'Ah, I am alive still!' All my friends die already. I am alive. It is fantastic.

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me.

Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

I was like a mutant when I was a boy. I learned to read when I was four years old; it was like a miracle.

One day I was sitting in my own pain, and suddenly all the pain and troubles of the world came to me. I received all the pain of the world, all through my body.

I tweet 15 times a day to keep my brain stimulated.

Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.

Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything.

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.

I don't have interest in life. Life has an interest in me.

What could be the utopia for the present age?
To begin with, I would want all of human order to make a partnership, beginning in schools. It is atrocious that the children leave the partnership and go to be educated by a professor, just a man or a woman. This negates partnership. Classes should be taught by couples of both sexes, and children should be educated by a man and a woman ...
... not necessarily a husband and wife. This is what I would do as a first political measure to improve social life: all human activities would have to be carried out in complimentary pairs.

People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.