We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.
Interpretation
Emulating the work of great creators is a smart way to develop one's own style.
This quote highlights the idea that all artists borrow ideas and inspiration from those who came before them. It suggests that rather than simply copying, one should draw from the influences of great creators to develop a unique voice, thus transforming what could be seen as theft into a respectful homage or influence.
In practice
This quote could be shared in an art class discussion about inspiration and originality.
For 6,000 years, these rules have been unquestionably right. And yet we break them every day. People feel that something is wrong in life. There is some kind of atmosphere that makes people now turn to other values. They want to contemplate the basic questions of life, and that is probably the real reason for wanting to tell these stories.
Things have changed for the worse. That's why former eastern bloc countries are electing communists again. We are missing them and longing for the times we cursed before.
Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.
I like chance meetings - life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.
Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.
The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.
Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
A poet’s freedom lies precisely in the impossibility of worldly success. It is the freedom of one who knows he will never be anything but a failure in the world’s estimation, and may do as he pleases. The poet is a man on the sidelines of life, sidelined for life. He belongs to the aristocracy of the outcast, the lowest of the low, below the salt of the earth. A member of the most ancient regime in the world. One that cannot, it seems, be overthrown.
The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
To those supporters who were told that I abandoned them, that is untrue. I abandoned greed, corruption, and compromise, never you, and never the artistic gifts and abilities that sustained me.
I can't just make a song people can dance in a club to... it still has to be real.
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