Alejandro Jodorowsky Quotations | Page 2

I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me.

I am old, but I feel very beautiful.

I don't believe in failing. I have dignity.

If you are great, 'El Topo' is a great picture. If you are limited, 'El Topo' is limited.

If you don't make errors, how can you be conscious?

In Chile, they have no movies. They have awful popular movies.

It's not the same thing to make a work - a film, a book, a play - about youth as it is to make one about old age.

Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.

Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything.

My films are completely new. I am not similar to anybody in the history of movies.

The worse the newspapers speak of the world, the better I feel.

Today a picture has value if it makes a lot of money. Myself, I declare I want to make a picture to lose money. Really! I want to lose money.

We only have problems we really want to have.

What's important is to give your ideas to the world if you love the world.

When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair.

I never wanted to study art. And I don't think you need to study art if you are an artist. It's even dangerous to go to school. You need to do whatever you want, as you want.

A person is not the same in his life at all times. Your consciousness is developing all the time. When I started making 'El Topo,' I was one person. When I finished that picture, I was another person.

I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.

Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.

Failure doesn't mean anything, it just means changing paths.

I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.

The apocalypse is now! Americans know this, that the only hope is the flying saucers. Do you know how I see the world? Like a person who is dying. It's a worm who is dying to make a butterfly. We must not stop the worm from dying, we must help the worm to die to help the butterfly to be born. We need to dance with death. This world is dying, but very well. We will make a big, big enormous butterfly. You and I will be the first movements in the wings of the butterfly because we are speaking like this.

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

Maybe if literature was prohibited the same way as cocaine, people out of pure curiosity would try to get a couple of lines

Every mind has another vision of reality. There is not a common reality. Every person thinks he is like the others, but every person is different, living in his own psychology.

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.

One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.

Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don't ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it!

One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.

The only thing a master can teach is how to learn about yourself. There are no secrets. They are only techniques to waken yourself.

Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.

I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating,

The imagination wants to construct the new worlds, no? Creativity is a solution. If I ask you, "What is your goal in life? How many years do you have to live before to die? How many years do you have? And what you will do with these years you have?" You have pressure there. "How you will realize a good life? How? Tell me!" Then, you start to open your mind.

My writing routine is everyday I put a record on, the same one since 20 years. Then I burn a stick of incense, I put perfume here on the insides of my soles, I paint my left testicle red, and I write.

And I imagine... with great pleasure... all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsion and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live.

When the bull's-eye becomes as big in your mind as an elephant, you are sure to hit it.

For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.

One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.

You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.

Art gives to you a new conception of reality, opens your mind, opens your heart, opens your desire of action.

Words don't heal. Art heals!

If art is not a medicine for the society, it is a poison.

You can’t have a masterpiece without madness,

I think the art of filmmaking is something you learn through actions, by doing it, not by learning theories. And as you do it, your mind starts to change.

Every artist - even if they do Superman, they do Batman, and things like that - they are speaking about his life. Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.

I think Twitter is the literature of the 21st century. I think it's an incredible art because when you make a book, you don't know who reads it. But every line, I write a million people, they read it, and then they insult me, they love me, they discuss, they give an opinion instantly, immediately. They are completely in communication, immediately. That is a real art.

Humanity are not individuals; we are collective. And if we have difference, we have wars all the time. We have crisis. We need to open our mind. This is the only solution we have.

I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.

The world is how we see the world. Some people see the world good, the other people see the world bad. Every person has an idea of the world with a subjective [viewpoint].

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.

If the picture is not an artistic picture, it's show, like television. Television series are very funny, but it's a collective production. An industrial art. A car is not made by a person, it's made by a group of creators, only to go to the market to buy your cigarettes. That is a car - they are not a big art, they are a little art.

I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest.

Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition.

You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.

Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything. You are sitting and seeing something moving in front of you, and then your mind goes into a trance. You are completely there. It's a real great art; it's not only a business. It's to open the mind, to understand this mystery within reality. This is why we need it.

I was raping Frank Herbert but with love.

For art to be art it has to cure.

The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture.