Julian Schnabel Quotations

I didn't want to be like everybody else. Art was my religion.

It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

Because I'm not doing it for the money, I'm doing it because I feel like that story needs to be told or clarified, or something needs to be shown about that.

This camera works like photosynthesis. It is as if you were Xeroxing your own face. The pictures have such physicality: their surface is like fine leather, stained from chemicals. Each one has a body and is more than an image.

It's very difficult, I think, for people to be around you when you're getting lots of attention. It's very difficult for young people to understand what that's about when people start treating you differently when you've been doing the same thing you were doing the day before.

I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.

I paint paintings because I can't get the experience in any other way but there are many more experiences that are equally satisfying to me and equally inept at answering all my questions, but hover in exactitude in describing themselves and defying me to define their logic.

You know, painting has given me a lot of freedom, because for some reason, I've been able to paint things, organize things in a way that I see that don't have any buffers or compromises in them.

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.

There are generations of people who have never seen a big plate painting in person. And they don't know what the hell they look like, they don't know what it feels like to stand in a room with them.

I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.

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

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.

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?

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.

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 think it was so unfair that people attacked Freida Pinto for being an Indian, playing a Palestinian.

Making a painting is like playing the saxophone. You hit the note and it comes out.

What's interesting about making art is that you take everything you know about it and you bring it up to that point, and you start making a physical thing that addresses what that is. And when you do it, you don't know anything about it - if it's going to work or not work.

Sometimes I'll dream that I saw a show and then I'll wake up in the morning and realize that I didn't see the show, that it was my dream. And I just remember what the paintings look like in the dream and I think, "Oh, nobody painted those. I can do that."

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'm not mannerist. I don't think I'm interested in mannerism. If I ever use it in a way, or if manner is like some kind of product of certain sorts of usage of different kinds of materials, then it's about involution or turning in on that.

I think not knowing what to think of your paintings is a good place to be.

Maybe my work looks a little crazy, a little insane, but I don't really see myself as a crazy artist or a shaman artist.

I have a completely romantic idea about making paintings, I guess.

In a certain way, my work had set me up to be against lots of things. If there wasn't some sort of sanction for it in the public world, it might have been...it wouldn't have been tolerated, because people don't want things to get shaken up...

I think people have problems sometimes when things are too general. In fact, they are not really general at all.

I think it's your own ghost, seeing the work and just thinking if it will be okay to leave that around.

I don't think my paintings are self-conscious but you feel the consciousness of them. Without them being self-conscious.

There are certain times you want to be here and there are certain times you want to just go. And when you go, it's usually so exhausting you have to check into a hospital when you come home!

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.

The thing about living in New York is that there are other artists; that is the most difficult, I think they are the hardest critics.

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.

It's nice to see your name in print. It's interesting.

I was always very...impatient about showing my paintings to people.

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 think basically I'm a painter, but I would use anything to make my point.

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.

I think, basically, I'm an abstract artist. I just think that that's not even an issue. I think everything's abstract.

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 style is a fringe benefit that looks like you made it.

I wanted to show painting paintings first, then the plate paintings; now I can show that I've sort of freed myself from stylistic inhibitions.

It's a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own.

There's been too much attention on marketing. Can't we just talk about the paintings?

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.

I guess I am ruthless too because that's what makes a great artist. But I also respect people, I don't go around stepping on their heads.

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 never paid much attention to being Jewish when I was a kid. In fact, I'd say my religion was more surfing than Judaism - that's what I spent most of my time doing.

You can't have a good bullfight without a good bull.

My compulsion is to create things.

I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists who were doing interesting thing, but I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists.

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've never made a movie to make money. I've never made a painting to make money.

I think that truth is stranger than fiction, and it's nice to know the people you're making a movie about.

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.

It doesn't matter what I think I am, it matters what I do.

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.

I work with things left over from other things.

I don't think the meaning in my paintings comes from just using broken dishes.

A lot of what I do is about being in the moment and I think that's hard for people to get. I like it when things suddenly affect the painting. I mix up this red and it affects the whole painting or this little bit of white falls down there, and something changes the whole nature of the thing. The residue on what happens, that's what's in the paintings.

If I hung one of my paintings next to someone else's, I knew mine would kind of pop off the wall.

I do dream about art, and images come to me in dreams. I am definitely hoping to be in touch with my subconscious. I expect a call any minute.

I think beauty is a feeling that you get after you've had an experience. It's the way you feel about it that is beautiful.

I think it's good when people don't write good things about your work. I mean, what a great compliment it is to be called a charlatan.

Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.

I want the paintings to take me or the viewer out somewhere else.

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.

When art is really great, it's really powerful, can really do something to you, make you feel more alive and make you feel more connected to something. If you don't feel like that when you do it, and you just make a movie to make money, that would be pretty boring to me. I just wouldn't do it. That would be like sitting in an office, which I don't want to do.

Paintings are not like the Internet. They're not like movies. They're not electronic-friendly. You have to go see them. You have to stand in front of them. That's the great thing about them.

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.