208 Quotes by Abbas Kiarostami

"Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can't believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I'm interested in."

"From my very first movie, what was my concentration, my inspiration, was I didn't want to narrate something, I didn't want to tell a story. I wanted to show something, I wanted for them to make their own story from what they were seeing."

"The one-word cinema wasn't possible for me anymore. I'd hit a wall, a dead end. Therefore I thought I'd turn back."

"Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward."

"Usually when I take my films to festivals, I feel incredibly anxious about them. I wonder how it will be received, how the audience will react. I feel deeply responsible for them."

"There are at least two retrospectives of my work each year in some country."

"It's not so much a question of whether we've shot it through 35mm or digital video; what is important is whether the audience accepts it as real."

"I think life is so difficult to catch, it's so furtive, that a copy, a film, can in no way catch it and represent it."

"Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it."

"I was mentioning with the digital camera, maybe this new fashion of filmmaking gives a closer look of what life may be like. But it's still nothing but a copy."