R. J. Cutler Quotes

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

I'm generally not a fan of didactic art because it papers over many of the hard experiences about war or anything else in life. I wanted to explore various aspects of the experience without an eye towards delivering any particular message.

I think the line is where you're in the studio, you're creating. That belongs to you as an artist. Nothing should taint that. I shouldn't be thinking about what the fans want, I shouldn't be thinking about what the radio wants, what the label wants, what your manager wants, a song for the chicks, a song for the street.

I don't ever give my opinion. Opinions I have about anything are in my personal life.

Complete objectivity is not an option. We are all subjective about the way we respond to 'what is,' whether it's the people we encounter, the circumstances in our lives, or ourselves. What we can do is reduce our subjectivity - what I call 'I see, therefore it is.'

The validity of doctrine does not depend on whose ox it gores.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong.

I paint what I see and not what others like to see.

I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography, not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it. That's what I still do today.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

An artist should be as impartial as God.

Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.

It is not music's function to express rational necessities.

[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.

I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully.

Partisanship is not part of my professional makeup.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.

Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

I'm a filmmaker who is known for these ambiguous portraits that tell multiple sides of the story without really telling the audience what to think.