Quotes About Camera And Life

“This was too much for him to handle. It was like watching memories of his life play out from a different camera angle, sometimes with new scenes added. He was living DVD extras.”

— Dennis Sharpe

“Few things in cultural programming in the mass media are quite as disturbing as watching Charlie Rose leaning forward, craning out over his table, peering deeply, on the very precipice of an incisive question sure to reveal a real Idea, a slim, almost excited smile starting to form on his lips as he imagines the dawning joy of the intellectual life revealed for himself and his audience, and we move with the camera, oh-so-sincerely, to his guest and see that all this expectation and anticipation is addressed to ... Lance Armstrong. Or Ron "Opie" Howard. Or Gary Shandling ... ..”

— Curtis White

“It's only just beginning to occur to me that it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on. [ ... ] You need as much ballast as possible to stop you floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one guy on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then? I've got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I'm in danger of falling off the edge.”

— Nick Hornby

“People have forgotten to use their memories. They look at life through the lens of a camera or the screen of a cell phone instead of remembering how it looks, how it smells”

— Jamie McGuire

“The living, he thought, should never be used to serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead
he glanced at Bruce, the empty shape beside him
should, if possible, serve the purposes of the living. That, he reasoned, is the law of life. And the dead, if they could feel, might feel better doing so. The dead, Mike thought, who can still see, even if they can't understand: they are our camera.”

— Philip K. Dick

“With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives. Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials. As we cooked in our kitchens we were careful to follow the manufacturer's instructions, as we made love in our bedrooms we embraced within a familiar repertoire of gestures and affections. The medium of film had turned us all into minor actors in an endlessly running daytime serial. In the future, airliners would crash and presidents would be assassinated within agreed conventions as formalised as the coronation of a tsar.”

— J.G. Ballard

“Making a film of a work you've played for six weeks gives you intimate knowledge of the character. By the time you go in front of the camera you've worked out the behavior and life of a character.”

— Linda Lavin

“I treat the camera like a person - I gaze into it. Photos are a flat thing, and you need to put life into them.”

— Cara Delevingne

“I rarely joke unless I'm in front of a camera. It's not what I am in real life. It's what I do for a living.”

— Christopher Guest

“To not be self-conscious of your appearance is huge, and something that I desperately hope to carry into film at some point in my useless life - to not be thinking, 'My ear looks weird from this angle, why is the camera over there?'”

— Anna Kendrick

“One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.”

— Oliver Stone

“I know I have the ability to do so much more than just stand in front of the camera the rest of my life.”

— Jennie Garth

“When I look out [the window] at the big houses on either side of the road, it's obvious we've entered the rich side of town. Poor people don't post signs like NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE DRIVE, PRIVATE PROPERTY, MONITORED BY CAMERA SURVEILLANCE. I should know because I've been poor my entire life, and the only person I know who ever posted a sign like these is my friend ... and he actually stole the sign off a rich guy's yard.”

— Simone Elkeles

“Nina stared at the woman who had raised her and saw the truth at last.
Her mother was a lioness. A warrior. A woman who'd chosen a life of hell for herself because she wanted to give up and didn't know how.
And with that small understanding came another, bigger one. Nina suddenly saw her own life in focus. All these years, she'd been traveling the world over, looking for her own truth in other woman's lives.
But it was here all along, at home with the one woman she's never even tried to understand. No wonder Nina had never felt finished, never wanted to publish her photographs of the woman. Her quest had always been leading up to this moment, this understanding. She's been hiding behind the camera, looking through the glass, trying to find herself. But how could she? How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother's?”

— Kristin Hannah

“Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are.”

— David Hurn

“Given my antipathy for the paparazzi, she thinks it's hysterical that I'm so attached to my cameras. But to me, what I do is the anti-paparazzi. TMZsters want to capture surface. If a picture's in focus, it's great. My goal is to capture what the surface is hiding. There's a story behind every face, every landscape, every still life. There's a soul in every subject, and when my camera and I are really speaking, really working together properly, we can capture it.”

— Hilary Duff

“We're seniors."
"I know," I said
"So aren't you ... curious?"
"About what?"
"About life. Out there. Life!" she said again. "Tell me, Cameron Ann Morgan, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
We'd reached another door, and I stopped and looked up at the camera that monitored the entrance, just as I whispered, "Alive.”

— Ally Carter

“But between the images, we are privy to the real-life action being played out on the set. Peeta's attempt to continue speaking. The camera knocked down to record the white tiled floor. The scuffle of boots. The impact of the blow that's inseparable from Peeta's cry of pain.
And his blood as it splatters the tiles.”

— Suzanne Collins

“A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.”

— Robert Bresson

“Once I became a photographer, it stopped me being scared or intimidated by gangs of young men of whatever stripe. Initially, I could hide behind my camera but eventually I came to realize that if I was polite and friendly to them, then they probably would be to me too - a good life lesson.”

— Derek Ridgers

“Permanence can only be found in the immortality offered by the click of a camera. Like it or not, life moves on as fleetingly as the photograph is enduring.”

— Diane Keaton

“I don't really diet or anything. I'm miserable when I'm dieting and I like the way I look. I'm really sick of all these actresses looking like birds I'd rather look a little chubby on camera and look like a person in real life, than look great on screen and look like a scarecrow in real life.”

— Jennifer Lawrence

“A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.”

— Robert Smithson

“I am certain that if I have any merit, it is knowing how to make good use of my eyes, to guide the camera in its task of capturing not only colors, lights and shadows, but the movement of life itself.”

— Gabriel Figueroa

“I learned very quickly that the hard thing in life is to make good films. Technically, filmmaking is the camera and the actor telling the story and that's what I'm more interested in doing.”

— Matthew Vaughn

“You know, the Chinese don't like to be photographed because they believe that a part of their life is being taken away by the photographer. And in a way, they're right. The photographer is trying to get the prettiest moment of a life in his camera.”

— Bert Stern

“I knew from a very early age, that what I saw on tv had nothing to do with real life. So I wanted to make a record of real life. That included having a camera with me at all times.”

— Nan Goldin

“For those who were desperate, my camera became an object of hope ( ... )Throughout my year-long coverage of the monsoon world, my strongest conviction was that I was involved in the fundamentals of life.”

— Steve McCurry

“If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.”

— Diane Arbus

“I had prepared myself for the second half of my life [to be] filled with other passions that don't include being in front of the camera. And then all of a sudden I got more work and more work and more work. And I went, "Well maybe things have shifted." And I think they have.”

— Sandra Bullock

“This is life. It is everywhere, and it is here for the taking. I am alive and I know this, now, in a more profound way than when I am doing anything else. These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph.”

— Bill Jay

“The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin