Gus Van Sant Quotes

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

Many of my cartoons are not a belly laugh. I go for nostalgia, the lump in the throat, the tear in the eye, the tug in the heart.

I think I'm a very sentimental person. Conscious or not, that's what draws me to the kind of films I want to make.

Music has brought me a lot of emotional moments.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

I tend to like songs that are very emotional, that strike a chord with me emotionally.

The trick of 'Up' was to balance the sad stuff with the silly stuff.

This is really showing me what certain movies mean to people.

If I watch 'Gone With the Wind,' I always find it interesting. I think, 'What's going to happen next? What's that character going to do?' But you know, you never really need to watch the films you made again. They stay inside you, always with you.

Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the U.S.S.R. They wring your soul.

It's the poignancy and sadness in things that gets to me.

'American Graffiti' stayed in my mind, but I don't think to this day I've done a film that captured that same level of melancholy. It was so well done. Talking about it has given me the idea I might try harder to make that melancholy film!

Every film that I have done has a special place in my heart.

I think sometimes good sentimentality is fun when it's balanced.

I think any critic that takes a swipe at 'Full House' is like taking the family dog. The dog brings you joy and happiness and makes you forget your problems, and that's all 'Full House' does. Literally, taking a potshot at that show is like taking the family dog.

My books are all fantastically sentimental.

For whatever reason, I've always gravitated towards music that feels nostalgic or longing or beautifully tragic.

With every one of our films, we try to touch emotions, but we don't try to touch the same emotions each time.

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

Usually, when you're in a movie, you're disconnected from it. You're never going to feel what you felt when you made it.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.

Melancholy is kind of sweet sometimes, I think. It's not a negative thing. It's not a mean thing. It's just something that happens in life, like autumn.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

Music is...a form of remembering, a return to the seasons of the heart long gone.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.