Arlovski Andrei Quotes

Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother?s. ~ Andrei Codrescu

As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.

He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty. ~ Andrei Makine

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

After so many years, I feel more American than anything else, but I'm also Romanian and whatever other oddities of temperament I picked up elsewhere, in Transylvania or France, for instance. These days, everybody is both an exile and a resident - they don't call it the global village for nothing. ~ Andrei Codrescu

Brian Myers takes a fresh approach. He largely ignores what the regime tells the outside world about itself, but concentrates instead on what North Koreans themselves are supposed to believe, paying special attention to the North Korean narratives and mass culture, including movies and television shows. ( ... ) There are few books that can give the world a peek into the Hermit Kingdom. The Cleanest Race provides a reason to care about how those in North Korea see themselves and the West. It is possibly the best addition to that small library. ~ Andrei Lankov

Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own. ~ Andrei Codrescu

It is a mistake to talk about the artist looking for his subject. In fact, the subject grows within him like a fruit and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth. The poet has nothing to be proud of. He is not master of the situation, but a servant. Creative work is his only possible form of existence, and his every work is like a deed he has no power to annul. For him to be aware that the sequence of such deeds is due and ripe, that it lies in the very nature of things, he has to have faith in the idea; for only faith interlocks the system of images for which read system of life. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Romanians are culturally European, very close to the French. Socially, they are now building a society that is emotionally closer to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece. ~ Andrei Codrescu

He tried not to think, not to understand: could there be any understanding of this? This had come, had crushed, and was roaring. If you thought about it--you would throw yourself through a hole in the ice.
In his soul something bellowed piteously like a bullock under the knife in the slaughterhouse. ~ Andrei Bely

It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold. ~ Andrei Codrescu

Can you sacrifice a few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top
and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe [Andrei] your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can't trust them as if they were. ~ Ayn Rand

The beauty of Molly's is that it is not, whether in the daytime or at night, the exclusive preserve of an age or income group. Unlike the sterile night scenes of pretentious San Francisco or New York, Molly's (and most other New Orleans bars) welcomes all ages, all colors, and all sexual persuasions, provided they are willing to surrender to the atmosphere. ~ Andrei Codrescu

O masses, o masses! When will you assume the image and likeness of your avant-garde? ~ Andrei Platonov

I remember, the first time I saw a [Andrei] Tarkovsky film, I was shocked by it. I didn't know what to do. I was fascinated, because suddenly I realized that film could have so many more layers to it than what I had imagined before. Then others, like Kurosawa and Fellini, were like a new discovery for me, another country. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

A child doesn't have to be a prodigy. The only thing that matters is that he should't become 'stuck' in childishness ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

I lived and languished. ~ Andrei Platonov

What I did was not for sexual pleasure. Rather it brought me some peace of mind. ~ Andrei Chikatilo

At Crowley Control Systems in Southfield, the message we received from Clark Crowley, delivered in an amble around the office every month or so, was: Keep up the fine work folks! At General Dexterity in San Francisco, the message we received from Andrei, delivered in a quantitative business update every Tuesday and Thursday, was: We are on a mission to remake the conditions of human labor, so push harder, all of you.

I began to wonder if, in fact, I knew how to push hard. In Michigan, my family all had families and extremely serious hobbies. Here, the wraiths were stripped bare: human-shaped generators of CAD and code. ~ Robin Sloan

Death is not enough for such men. We must add mechanics ~ Andrei Codrescu

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

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. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin
about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides; ~ Andrei Cherny

Five thousand boys and girls under the age of sixteen were estimated to have fought in the defense of Berlin. Five hundred survived. ~ Andrei Cherny

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. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

When you've nothing to live for, you get to thinking inside your head. ~ Andrei Platonov

I could not stop something I knew was wrong and terrible. I had an awful sense of powerlessness. ~ Andrei Sakharov

Kindness without truth comes across as flattery.

Truth without kindness comes across as disrespect.

Those who manage to find the sweet spot are the most persuasive. ~ Vizi Andrei

One woman sent me on a letter written to her by her daughter, and the young girl's words are a remarkable statement about artistic creation as an infinitely versatile and subtle form of communication:
'...How many words does a person know?' she asks her mother. 'How many does he use in his everyday vocabulary? One hundred, two, three? We wrap our feelings up in words, try to express in words sorrow and joy and any sort of emotion, the very things that can't in fact be expressed. Romeo uttered beautiful words to Juliet, vivid, expressive words, but they surely didn't say even half of what made his heart feel as if it was ready to jump out of his chest, and stopped him breathing, and made Juliet forget everything except her love?
There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. Will, feeling, emotion - these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door.. The frames of the screen move out, and the world which used to be partitioned off comes into us, becomes something real... And this doesn't happen through little Audrey, it's Tarkovsky himself addressing the audience directly, as they sit on the other side of the screen. There's no death, there is immortality. Time is one and undivided, as it says in one of the poems. "At the table are great-grandfathers ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

A child doesn't have to be a prodigy. He has to be a child. The only thing that matters is that he shouldn't become 'stuck' in childishness. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Only when Prince Andrei was gone did Rostov think of what he ought to have said. And he was still more angry at having omitted to say it. He ~ Leo Tolstoy

Cinema is a very difficult and serious art, it requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn't belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay married to a mate that cracked?
"Anything interesting happen at work today, honeybunch?"
"Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share. ~ Andrei Codrescu

If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique. The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

MORE CONSISTENTLY THAN EVER I WAS TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT CINEMA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ART HAS ITS OWN POSSIBILITIES WHICH ARE EQUAL TO THOSE OF PROSE. I WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW CINEMA IS ABLE TO OBSERVE LIFE, WITHOUT INTERFERING, CRUDELY OR OBVIOUSLY, WITH ITS CONTINUITY. FOR THAT IS WHERE I SEE THE POETIC ESSENCE OF CINEMA. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Criticism will always be closer to the truth than flattery. ~ Vizi Andrei

It's not a mystery, it's a secret. Because someone knows. A mystery is something no one knows. ~ Andrei Bitov

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side ... ~ Italo Calvino

Never trouble anyone else with what you can do yourself ~ 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

Men can be pitiless towards a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice. ~ Andrei Makine

Her recoil confirmed the disgust Grant felt inside. Who was he kidding, trying to put Vladimir and Andrei behind bars? He was no different from his father. Then he remembered Sophie's words.
"You're not like them. You're my McSailor."
A soft touch made him smile, thinking of Bonnie, before he realized it was Innochka's hand stroking his face. The touch of a mobster's girlfriend. He leaped back, still crouched on his feet. ~ Jennifer Lane

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

A film in cinema is what in theatre would be realism - and vice versa.
In cinema - as in life - the text, the words, are refracted in everything
apart from the words themselves. The words mean nothing
words are water. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best. ~ Andrei Zhdanov

He returned to his seat and sat down; the road is so long, so long; he had to get through these spaces where stations clustered about the track amidst the black night like some black coffin set with candles. He thought that minute was flying after minute, mile after mile, everything was moving - even he was moving - but to where?

("Adam") ~ Andrei Bely

I felt all the time that for the film to be a success the texture of the scenery and the landscapes must fill me with definite memories and poetic associations ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

He walked around all the useless things in the courtyard and touched them with his hands; for some reason, he wished that these would remember him, and love him. But he didn't believe they would. From childhood memories he knew how strange and sad it is after a long absence to see a familiar place again, for these unmoving objects have no memory and do not recognize the stirrings of a stranger's heart. ~ Andrei Platonov