I don’t think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great – I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.
I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.
You can understand conflict, but you don’thave to live in it.
Intuition is seeing the solution…..its emotion and intellect going together.
I love going into another world, and I love mysteries. So I don’t really like to know very much ahead of time. I like the feeling of dicovery.
It’s maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.
It doesn’t do any good to say, ‘This is what it means.’ When you are spoon fed a film, people instantly know what it is. I like films that leave room to dream.
I don’t remember my dreams too much. I hardly have ever gotten ideas from nighttime dreams. But I love daydreaming and dream logic and the way dreams go.
Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.
Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there’s comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.
I didn’t watch much TV as a kid and I don’ t watch it now. I don’ t find anything beautiful or unique to the medium, and the only thing you can do on TV that you can’t do in film is make a continuing story – which is so cool!
I love Bob Dylan. Who doesn’t? He tapped into some kind of vein and it keeps on keeping on. There’s nobody like him. He’s unique, and just… way out cool.
Music deals with time and timing. It’s so magical, but when you get into it, every little sound and every little space between the sounds, it’s critical, so critical. And if it’s not there, it not only feels wrong, but it ruins things.
More and more people are seeing the films on computers – lousy sound, lousy picture – and they think they’ve seen the film, but they really haven’t.
I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You’ve got to plug this painting in, and it’s got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.
Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things.
A filmmaker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don’t have to die to shoot a death scene.
The mantra that you’re given in Transcendental Meditation you keep to yourself. The reason being, true happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.
Life should be blissful, and blissful doesn’t mean just a small happiness. It’s huge. It is profound.
I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.
Sugar does make people happy, but then you fall off the edge after a few minutes, so I’ve really pretty much cut it out of my diet. Except for cupcakes. I like those.
Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way.
You’re right on the money with that. We’re all like detectives in life. There’s something at the end of the trail that we’re all looking for.
Most of Hollywood is about making money – and I love money, but I don’t make the films thinking about money.
Somehow, the French got this idea of the starving artist. Very romantic, except it’s not so romantic for the starving artist.
A lot of artists think they want anger. But a real, strong, bitter anger occupies the mind, leaving no room for creativity.
Happy accidents are real gifts, and they can open the door to a future that didn’t even exist. It’s kind of nice sometimes to set up something to encourage or allow happy accidents to happen.