69 Quotes by Jonas Mekas

Just as in writing, there are novelistic and sort of pedestrian ways of telling a story, to write a postcard with your little pocket camera and put it on websites. I think that’s where the most exciting kind of imagery and content is being recorded and exchanged today.

We try to hide it every way we can, but it always comes out, the lyricism. A Lithuanian connot live without nature. You can’t detach him from the wide, green fields, from the brooks, the snow, the cobwebs flying through the air in late September, or from his forests, fragrant with moss and beries.

I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called ‘Film Culture.’

A meeting with nature means to me sometimes more than meeting with a person. It wakes up feelings, memories. Its arrows shoot deep, always on target.

I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship.

The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, “Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema.”

You want me to be rational. The most rational thing is the machine. Go to the machines. All their separate parts work together. But I live with no purpose, irrationally.

All nature is full of hatred for humans. I don’t think man has any friends among plants or animals. I suspect that even dogs and cats, those so-called best friends of man, are only pretending friendship to man in order to spy on his misdeeds, and they would betray him without blinking an eye the first chance they had. They know that Man is the worst of the beasts.

I am very active on the Internet. In 2007, I made one film every day and posted it on my website. That was a 365-day project, really exhausting, but I still put a lot of stuff on – from life, friends, my own life.