Something Like an Autobiography Quotes

“No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is and they would put an end to it.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself. [Pg.189]”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“but ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“As if Japan weren't small enough to begin with, I fail to understand why it is necessary to think of it in even smaller units. No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion.
When writing about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“In other words, take “myself,” subtract “movies” and the result is “zero.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“Ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: 'The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.' What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls' volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word 'gate' very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“This is probably true of human life everywhere - a light exterior hides a dark underside.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“As I remember it, the fog-like substance that clouded my brain finally vanished as if blown away by the wind.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“Of course, compared to these two illustrious masters, Renoir and Ford, I am no more than a little chick.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“They lived their lives as if their sights were set on the clouds beyond the hill they were climbing.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“There are sometimes such human beings among film critics—the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can’t have such people among film directors.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“People who can’t make the simple distinction between what tastes good or bad have disqualified themselves from the human race,” was one of his pet theories.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“As the winds of the Great Depression blew across a Japan shaken to the very foundations of her economy, proletarian movements sprang up everywhere, including the field of fine art. At the other extreme was an art movement that advocated escape from the painful realities of the hard times, something that was called, in a sort of pidgin, “eroguro nan-sensu” (“erotic-grotesque nonsense”).”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“This little story has its charm and doesn’t really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“It’s a mistake to decree that a year’s progress must take place within exactly one year, no more and no less.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“It seems I come from a line that is overly emotional and deficient in reason. People have often praised us as sensitive and generous, but we appear to me to have a measure of sentimentality and absurdity in our blood.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“I had been ready to reproach her for the indignities she had caused me to suffer in the past, but suddenly I was moved by this figure of an old woman I no longer recognized, and all I could do was stare vacantly down at her.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography

“There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography