“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”
“I like silent pictures and I always have. They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be.”
On the style of the film Rashomon, as quoted in The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1998) by Donald Richie, 3rd edition, p. 79
Context: I like silent pictures and I always have. They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be. At any rate I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.
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Akira Kurosawa 16
Japanese film maker 1910–1998Related quotes

“Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.”
This is only a slightly misquoted version of "Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them", written by Frank Lloyd Wright in the magazine Architectural Record in March 1908.
Misattributed
Gallery Notes, Allbright-Knox Art Gallery, Vol. 24 summer 1961 pp. 9-14; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 197
1960s

Now for more than five years already, I do not know exactly how long, I'm more or less without employment, wandering here and there.. .But you will ask what is your definite aim? That aim becomes more definite, will stand out slowly and surely, as the rough draft becomes a sketch and the sketch becomes a picture.. .. my only anxiety is: how can I be of use in the world, cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good, how can I learn more and study profoundly certain subjects?
In his letter to brother Theo, from Cuesmes, Belgium July 1880; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 133) p. 19
1880s, 1880

“I don't take good pictures 'cause I have the kind of beauty that moves.”

On Alfred Hitchcock in an interview with John Simon (1971).

Attributed (1934) in Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (1997), p. 269–270