Andrei Tarkovsky People Quotations

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.

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.

People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger.

Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.

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

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

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

My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness

If we succeed with something, that is only because others are in need of what e have produced. And the more success we have with something, the more people require that we express it. So it goes without saying, as a result of this we in principle never win out, others win. We always lose