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All Quotes by author - Bill Viola
" A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry. "
Knife
Me
Cry
" A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together. "
Together
Place
Yourself
" Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep. "
Soul
Wake Up
Live
" Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history. "
Culture
History
Character
" Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic. "
Think
Key
Work
" I came of age at the end of the 1960s, just when video was also coming into the world. Companies such as Sony and Panasonic were starting to market it and we artists immediately knew how it could be used. "
Market
Starting
Used
" I cry a lot. Usually once a day. I think it's one of the most profound forms of human expression. "
Day
Expression
Human
" If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights. "
Time
Earth
Landscape
" In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one. "
Got
Understand
Bad
" In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made. "
Art
Student
Late
" I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age. "
Different
Age
Would
" My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem. "
Sometimes
Simple
Image
" One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don't say 'insecure' in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: 'Are they good enough?' 'Is this the right thing to do?' I really beat myself up over that. "
Myself
Say
Me
" Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts. "
Revolution
Starts
Hearts
" Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time. "
Experience
Beginning
Solitude
" The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities. For me the essential basis of video is the movement - something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment. "
Creative
Changes
Stand
" The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly. "
Earth
Think
Brain
" There is a big push that we all are engaged in, in wanting to have the newest in innovation - and I think that's all really great. But I also feel that human beings need to be aware of, and grounded in, history. "
Great
Think
Innovation
" There's another world out there just beyond the world we're in. It's just on the other side of that translucent, semitransparent surface. "
Out
Side
World
" The velocity and knee-jerk response to events happening in real time that television brings us precludes any kind of reflection or contemplation and therefore analysis. And that's been one of the greatest political dangers in the post-war era. The idea of the reasoned, thoughtful response goes out of the window. "
Political
Window
Time
" The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image. "
High School
Looking
Experience
" The world is fine and everything is normal and then, bang, you just get bowled over by the wrathful deities somehow. That happens in very small ways and happens in very large ways when you have a major conflagration in the world. It's another cycle of existence of human beings. "
Small
Normal
You
" This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see. "
Everything
Camera
Taught
" Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks. "
Giving
End
Survive
" Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity... but there's a feeling that life is interconnected, that there's life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us. "
Life
Work
Vision
" When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does. "
Giving
Making
Structure
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