A Quote by John Huston

When you make motion pictures, each picture is a life unto itself. When you finish and the picture is over, there's an understanding, a realization that we'll never be assembled this way again. That these relationships are severed forever and ever. And each of these films is a little life.
Each picture with its particular environment and unique personal relationships is a world unto itself - separate and distinct. Picture makers lead dozens of lives - a life for each picture. And, by the same token, they perish a little when each picture is finished and that world comes to an end. In this respect it is a melancholy occupation.
I made my last motion picture in March 1965 for Magna Pictures. 'Harlow,' based on the life of actress Jean Harlow... I didn't know at the time that 'Harlow' would be my last motion picture.
The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, fellow members of the motion picture industry and honored guests. This is one of the happiest moments of my life, and I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of their awards for your kindness. It has made me feel very, very humble and I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel, and may I say thank you and God bless you.
Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another.
There's always a time in any series of work where you get to a certain point and your work is going steadily and each picture is better than the next, and then you sort of level off and that's when you realize that it's not that each picture is better then the next, it's that each picture up's the ante. And that every time you take one good picture, the next one has got to be better.
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.
A picture story is a sequence of images combined with text in such a way that pictures and words reinforce each other. They produce a planned, organized combination giving detailed account of an event, personality or aspect of life.
Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.
Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
To an ever greater extent out experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema. Next to these pictures firsthand experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems they have usurped it. It therefore becomes imperative to understand the picture itself, not in order to uncover a lost reality, but to determine how a picture becomes a signifying structure of its own accord.
Never, ever, ever think that your life is over, but know always that each day, each hour, each moment is another beginning, another opportunity, another chance to re-create yourself anew.
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.
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.
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