Explore Quotes by Bill Viola

In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.

One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don't say 'insecure' in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: 'Are they good enough?' 'Is this the right thing to do?' I really beat myself up over that.

Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry.

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.

You can always tell in a movie when they are setting you up for something. If someone leaves an important object on the table and walks away, the camera will have some way of indicating that to you.

The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities. For me the essential basis of video is the movement - something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment.

There's another world out there just beyond the world we're in. It's just on the other side of that translucent, semitransparent surface.

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

Live your Art. Don't think about it.

There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.

People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.