Elia Kazan Quotes

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.

your soul is an inner something that is another you and hardly anybody knows what it's really thinkin' except you.

I like being behind the camera because I can control perception and what people see.

Write what's up there." Sister Ignatius pointed at her temple. "As a great man once said, this is a secret garden. We've all got one of those." "Jesus?" "No, Bruce Springsteen.

There is no entering into the secret thoughts of a man's heart.

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Rare are the people who can capture a human being.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

As small, quick, foolproof cameras became generally available, moreover, the camera has been used so much and so flabbily by so many people that it has acted as a sort of contraceptive on the ability to see.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I hid myself within myself ... and quietly wrote down all my joys, sorrows and contempt in my diary.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

There's something in everyone only they know.

I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."

It's important to me that the reader goes on a ride with the characters, that you set context enough to know, "Okay, here's where we are in the world. Now we're just going to go inside this person's head, this guy's heart, this woman's ambitions and take it down to very, very small scale."

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.

Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can't otherwise grasp.

The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.

I love a natural look in pictures. I like people with a feeling one way or another - it shows an inner life. I like to see that there’s something going on inside them.

There's this thing that publishes pictures of people out and about. So when I go out, I do see pictures of myself. I don't know where those pictures come from - I mean, I don't see the cameras. But I guess I'm just not looking for them.