Top 185 Quotes & Sayings by Alejandro Jodorowsky - Page 2

I am an honest artist.

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

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.

When I started to pay income tax, I was 50 years old.

I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.

My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.

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

I like Hollywood movies. I like them like I like to eat scrambled eggs; I like them for fun.

I hated Peter O'Toole. I wanted to kill that guy! When they said he was dead, I was happy. People said, 'Poor Peter O'Toole.' I was happy!

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.

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

I am old, but I feel very beautiful.

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.

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

Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.

I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures: because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong.

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

I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.

To have hands, to have fingers, is weird. Real life is weird, to have fingers?

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.

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

When I brought 'El Topo' to New York, no one understood the picture. But John Lennon understood. John and Yoko Ono, they presented 'El Topo' in the United States; they introduced it.

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 live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.

If you are great, 'El Topo' is a great picture. If you are limited, 'El Topo' is limited.

I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.

What's important is to give your ideas to the world if you love the world.

Pretty soon we will no longer have movies. We will have television series only.

I am still radical!

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

When my father died, I did not cry. When my cat died three days later, I cried a lot.

For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

I felt so alone as a boy because no one wanted to be friends with me.

Death is an art, you know.

I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don't like that. I think this is some kind of fascism - 'You need to react like that.' No. No. It's not like this; everyone needs to react as he can.

We only have problems we really want to have.

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 wanted to be loved by my father. I could do anything to be loved by my father.

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.

It's not the same thing to make a work - a film, a book, a play - about youth as it is to make one about old age.

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

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

Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

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

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

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

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.

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

If God gives you chocolate, you open your mouth, no?

I always think that art is a form of sacrifice.

Books are finished.

I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.

I was a happy man, never working. Sometimes I saw days with no money to eat. It was not so difficult.

I'm a purist.

My films are completely new. I am not similar to anybody in the history of movies.

I don't see myself as a moviemaker only, you know? When I can do a picture, I do. But I don't work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live.

I don't believe in failing. I have dignity.

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

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

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