Andrei Tarkovsky

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

The only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged by an overriding passion.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

The meaning of religious truth is hope.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

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

The whole concept of the avant-garde in art is meaningless. I can see what it means when applied to sport, for instance. But to apply it to art would be to accept the idea of progress in art; and though progress has an obvious place in technology — more perfect machines, capable of carrying out their functions better and more accurately — how can anyone be more advanced in art? How could Thomas Mann be said to be better than Shakespeare?

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

No one component of a film can have any meaning in isolation: it is the film that is the work of art. And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially or the sake of theoretical discussion.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

The man who has stolen in order never to thieve again remains a thief. Nobody who has ever betrayed his principles can have a pure relationship with life. Therefore when a film-maker says he will produce a pot-boiler in order to give himself the strength and the means to make the film of his dreams — that is so much deception, or worse, self-deception. He will never now make his film.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

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

Objectivity can only be the author's and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

What is Bresson's genre? He doesn't have one. Bresson is Bresson. He is a genre in himself. Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Vigo, Mizoguchi, Bunuel — each is identified with himself. The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin — comedy? No: he is Chaplin, pure and simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Never try to convey your idea to the audience — it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema would have no need for music at all.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

If there are some who talk the same language as myself, then why should I neglect their interests for the sake of some other group of people who are alien and remote? They have their own 'gods and idols' and we have nothing in common. ... If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts — for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Everything is conditioned by necessity of one kind or another; and if it were actually possible to find a person in conditions of total freedom, he would be like some deep water fish that had been dragged up to the surface. It's curious to reflect that Rublyov worked within the strictures of the canon! And the longer I live in the West the more curious and equivocal freedom seems to me. Freedom to take drugs? To kill? To commit suicide?

— 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

The Stalker seems to be weak, but essentially it is he who is invincible because of his faith and his will to serve others.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition — otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware the beauty is summoning him.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

What nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment it is nothing.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

It seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroads, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the existence of blind consumer, subject to the implacable march of new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a new way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, to turn to God.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

We know perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any currency.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Freedom is inseparable from conscience. And even if it is true that all the ideas developed by the social conciousness are the product of evolution, conscience at least has nothing to do with the historic process. Conscience, both as a sense and as a concept, is a priori immanent in man, and shakes the very foundations of the society that has emerged from our ill-conceived civilisation.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

"Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards." In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to "fly upwards".

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

— Andrei Tarkovsky

The film 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

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

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

What moved me was the theme of the harmony which is born only of sacrifice, the twofold experience of love. It's not a question of mutual love: what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment, it is nothing.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

— Andrei Tarkovsky