My early paintings weren't that good - I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own.
I'm not saying I'm the only Jewish person who cares about Palestinian people, but unfortunately, their voices are not necessarily heard as loudly as they should be.
If I hung one of my paintings next to someone else's, I knew mine would kind of pop off the wall.
When I'm making a movie, I don't like to know what's going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.
Sometimes my kids might tell me they had a dream or and maybe I'll paint some paintings from their dream. That's one good thing you get from your kids. Rob them of their dreams.
I don't know if I could, like, see a face and know what the face of beauty looks like, but after I've seen it I know if I've felt like it was beauty.
I was always very... impatient about showing my paintings to people.
It's nice to see your name in print. It's interesting.
Many people say to me, "I saw [Miral] and it really stayed with me. I woke up the next day and really thought about it, and have been thinking about it for awhile." That was my goal.
Can I find a poetic that can be subversive enough to grab people in some subliminal way, to where they feel that they are altered and have had an experience that belonged to them?
When I made my first film, Basquiat, I think one of the criticisms was that the way I work is episodic. Later, as people started to look at the movies, they started to realize that maybe that's my style. If I could do it better or another way, I guess I would.
I like when people get really close to the paintings, when they can't really get away from them, I like them to operate in that way on the viewer.
I think people have problems sometimes when things are too general. In fact, they are not really general at all.
We need to not be scared [of muslim], but understand each other. When you're around these people, you see they have much more in common than their differences.
Some people must go to extremes to get the world in balance for themselves. Some can't bear bright lights, so wherever they go they search for the dark; they turn the lights down, anything to sustain some level of comfort.
I think that truth is stranger than fiction, and it's nice to know the people you're making a movie about.
Some people might think that the paintings are involved with a mythic - not just subject matter - but a certain sort of physical space that the paintings occupy...like personages.
Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.
There were some types of sanctions that happen in the public world that made my work acceptable, where someone looks at the paintings and they don't - they may go, "okay," and then look at it in a different sort of way. Instead of just looking at it as some type of wild art, they look at it in a historical perspective or context.
Nobody is perfect. I don't think it's the most scathing indictment of anybody. It's pretty innocuous. [Miral] is just the story of one family and one girl, living in that part of the world, and that's what goes on over there. I thought that maybe it would be informative and useful for people to know more about it.
You seem to make different concessions with yourself about what you want to focus on or not, and what you want to pay attention to.
I think it was so unfair that people attacked Freida Pinto for being an Indian, playing a Palestinian.
I don't like building, I'm not a carpenter, I don't like constructions particularly and things like that, but placements and the kinds of psychological weight that different materials have is pretty interesting to me.
I think the nice thing about showing work in New York is that other artists come to see it. When you show work in Switzerland or somewhere else, everywhere else seems to be the provinces in a certain way. You wonder what your paintings are doing on the walls and you wonder who's looking at them.
The movie [Miral] is not pro-Palestinian. It's about Palestinians. It's a Palestinian story, written by a Palestinian person. I don't know anybody else that could have done that
