Top 30 Frederick Wiseman Quotes
#1. An angelfish priestess in anemone drag sat on a post and wished that she were a conch man.
Stepan Chapman
#2. I'm very careful of not being critical of other people's movies, which work in different styles. I think some of my movies can be interpreted as critical of their subjects.
Frederick Wiseman
#3. I have no more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to any one less worthy.
Jane Austen
#4. Of course there's conscious manipulation! Everything about a movie is manipulation ... If you like it, it's an interpretation. If you don't like it, it's a lie - but everything about these movies is a distortion.
Frederick Wiseman
#5. Editors keep pushing
deadline strain while people sleep
on benches and subway grates;
a welter weight boxer dances
on the platform at 125th Street
station, commuters look unfazed...
Kristen Henderson
#6. In moviemaking, you learn to pay attention to detail, because so much is in the detail. And when you're shooting, you try to be very alert to what's going on, even if you're tired.
Frederick Wiseman
#7. Anybody whose mind is functioning at all can't be content with the way the world works.
Frederick Wiseman
#8. I'm too busy to be nostalgic, which is one of the reasons to keep busy. I'm not a very sentimental person.
Frederick Wiseman
#9. My goal is to make as many films as possible about different aspects of American life.
Frederick Wiseman
#10. It's weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it's just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it's a lot more emotionally raw.
Cory Doctorow
#12. You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.
Margaret Atwood
#13. Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
Pat Conroy
#14. My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#15. Whether you're a newspaper journalist, a lawyer, a doctor. You have to organize your thoughts.
Frederick Wiseman
#16. My mom always talks about how hard it was to grow up in a political family. It's always split up, and just - I want to have fun in life. No, politics isn't on the list.
Patrick Schwarzenegger
#17. I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at.
Frederick Wiseman
#18. I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.
Frederick Wiseman
#19. I'd be more interested in doing a smaller, character driven thing, rather than another action picture.
Sigourney Weaver
#20. Christ! He thought we even have a male stripper. What's he going to do, throw his thong at the vampires?
Derek Gunn
#21. Sharks are being driven to extinction because people want to eat their fins and their flesh.
Barbara Block
#22. You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. Not all minds are the same. Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are all aspects of choice.
Frederick Wiseman
#23. I'm interested in ordinary experience, and regardless of the precise definition of ordinary, and I've found that in so-called ordinary experience, there is as much comedy, tragedy, sadness, as there is in great drama. And I don't invent it, I recognize it.
Frederick Wiseman
#24. He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heavensent dreams and divine possibilities.
Jack London
#25. It is fifty percent what they see, and fifty percent what they think they see.
Anne Fortier
#26. Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.
Frederick Wiseman
#28. One's relationship to time is complicated, and sometimes a day will drag on forever and sometimes it'll be over in a flash. When you look back, "I'm old," after 40 or 60 years, I can't believe I'm as old as I am.
Frederick Wiseman
#29. Making movies is an effort, is an attempt to leave a trace of your existence.
Frederick Wiseman
#30. If you want a thing done well, get a couple of old broads to do it.
Bette Davis
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
