Stan Brakhage's Quotes

Art is a sense of magic.

No one is out to get you. It's just that... people are monkeys.

How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?

I love being objected to. It worries me, but I love being objected to.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

Poetry is a totally different art than film.

The capacity to be intrinsic and vulgar is American.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

There are a lot of movies made for nobody.

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.

The video maker doesn't easily face a blank page. Because the videomaker can run it either any way, this way or the other way and erase it if they don't like it and so on.