Michael Snow Quotes

When you narrow down your range and are looking through just that narrow aperture of the lens, the intensity of what you see is so much greater.

There is really not that much improvisation in my films. There is an acceptance of a chance.

Say you are doing a portrait and the face is perfectly done, but the rest of it is done in brushstrokes. That is sort of like what might happen in the films.

The things that can go wrong are particular to mediums and they make for qualities that really are of the medium.

Speed is a way to escape consciousness and just act.

If you think too much in the music you are too late.

I do a lot of challenges I run marathons and stuff like that and I like to challenge myself.

Sometimes you talk to people who really don't know anything about your work, and what can you say?

To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.

Some of my films have caused riots, fights, and all kinds of things.

I am a little bit of a foul mouth and I just like to give it back to people.

I really want to make physical things so that the experience is a real experience and not just conceptual.

I try to make each film a different film.

The piano is a bit of a monster because it is this center of Western music and so much has been done with it and it is a fixed pitch instrument. It is a bit like trying to paint because there is the weight of all that has been done before.

I don't know what is happening to people but they are not as tough as they used to be.

Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).

Socially in my alliances I wanted to just have a strong alliance and making decisions but not putting it out there but letting other people be the target in that way. I think it worked until I should not have been playing that way anymore.

The idea that recording itself is an instrument.

I don't watch a lot of reality TV.

You have to act and this is something that happened in abstract expressionism too, it was a discovery particularly in De Kooning's paintings, great paintings. There's a lot of speed in his work and the speed produces things that only speed can produce.

We've been able to record the music of cultures that did not have recording, and thus preserve it. But there is also a negative aspect to this and that is the effect of the intrusion of the West on such cultures.

People's vocabulary has expanded.

I know there is also the influence of television and being able to zap away so it is a weightier decision to go into the theater than it used to be. And probably attention spans are not as strong as they used to be, generally speaking.

When my name started popping up I was quite irritated and a little bit in shock.

I do consider the individual things individual, in a way because that is what I do I guess, try to find out what is special about each medium.