Top 185 Quotes & Sayings by Alejandro Jodorowsky - Page 3

A true artist is always out of his time.

Society feeds terror and is in turn terrorized; we are afraid to lose, so we consume.

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

Revolutions are of no us;, it is necessary to work on transforming the brain: on sowing a different knowledge/awareness, on creating a new conscience, that is like a magic box full of brains.

For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.

You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.

The apocalypse is now! Americans know this, that the only hope is the flying saucers. Do you know how I see the world? Like a person who is dying. It's a worm who is dying to make a butterfly. We must not stop the worm from dying, we must help the worm to die to help the butterfly to be born. We need to dance with death. This world is dying, but very well. We will make a big, big enormous butterfly. You and I will be the first movements in the wings of the butterfly because we are speaking like this.

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

One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.

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.

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

I am an artist. For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul. And you are like in some kind of possession, where you are doing anything to get the visual. You become another person. You're becoming an artist in action. And then a lot of miracles come. A lot of discovering. It's a very complicated thing.

I shoot in Mexico, but I can shoot in India, anywhere. I have no nationality myself. My nationality is the planet.

I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.

And I imagine... with great pleasure... all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsion and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live.

Maybe if literature was prohibited the same way as cocaine, people out of pure curiosity would try to get a couple of lines

For many years, I did pantomime with Marcel Marceau. I was a writer for him and got to know very well how to use the body for illustration. I wanted to do a mother without arms, but using the arms of her son in Santa Sangre. The tragedy should always have something funny. Something weird.

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

Terrorists are not bad; they are limited by circumstances. They are human beings. I am very, very, very sad when they explode themselves and kill 40 to 60 persons. It's terrible. But also, I am sad for them, a young person who lost his whole life. It's terrible. They are limited by religion, by politics, by economical interests.

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 believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest.

I think the art of filmmaking is something you learn through actions, by doing it, not by learning theories. And as you do it, your mind starts to change.

Every person has a talent, but not the same one. Every person has to discover his personal talent and go with his talent. And then you are you, and what you do, you do because you love what you do, not because you want to be famous or because you're making money. You do the work because you love it.

Movies are movement. A comic-book is immobility. From one still picture to another, but no movement. You need to make the movement in your head. In the movies, you see the movement. It's different. What is the same is the mind of the creator.

Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don't ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it!

Life is a way of perfection. You need to work on yourself. You become a good person. If you do your work you will discover sublime feelings.

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.

Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.

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

You need to fight in order to count. Don't be afraid to believe the impossible and then fight with yourself to ameliorate yourself. Do it. Believe in yourself. Let a good seed be a good seed now, and then we'll have a good tree.

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

For art to be art it has to cure.

I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I dont 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; its from another century, its not for today.

I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating.

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.

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.

I was very scared when I saw it, because Dune was for me very important in my life. I was very sad I could not do it. When I saw that David Lynch would do it, I was very scared, because I admire him as a movie-maker, and I thought he would do well. But when I see the picture, I realize he never understood this picture. It's not a David Lynch picture. It's the producer who made that picture, no? Who made this horror. For David Lynch, it was a job. A commercial job. It never was that for me.

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

I don't see myself as a movie maker only. 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 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.

Words don't heal. Art heals!

Every artist - even if they do Superman, they do Batman, and things like that - they are speaking about his life. Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

In Chile they have no movies. They have awful popular movies. I am not a Latin American creator.

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.

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

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 never know if my picture is a good picture or a bad picture, because I'm not making pictures thinking of the public, I'm making pictures to realize myself.

You can't have a masterpiece without madness.

When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don't do it. But myself, I say: "To fail is only to see the way to fail."

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.

The only thing a master can teach is how to learn about yourself. There are no secrets. They are only techniques to waken yourself.

Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything. You are sitting and seeing something moving in front of you, and then your mind goes into a trance. You are completely there. It's a real great art; it's not only a business. It's to open the mind, to understand this mystery within reality. This is why we need it.

I don't want to make a style. Not tragedy, not comedy. Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.

My writing routine is everyday I put a record on, the same one since 20 years. Then I burn a stick of incense, I put perfume here on the insides of my soles, I paint my left testicle red, and I write.

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

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.

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

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

The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.

This is the thing: Art is more important than making a show, something that amuses people. Art is something that needs to give to the public, to the actors, to the artist - to give something that makes life the paradise it can be. Life can be a paradise. Still, I believe that. Even if there is Trump, there can be a paradise.

Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition.