Berenice Quotes & Sayings

I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods ) — Berenice Abbott

The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever. — Berenice Abbott

The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice
although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical. — Edgar Allan Poe

I really enjoyed 'Casino Royale' because suddenly something changed with this modernity and with Daniel bringing life to James Bond in a very new way. — Berenice Marlohe

There is none other like me. There is none other like her. We are unbelievable, impossible. I fly as high as the Heavens which cast me out. I have run out my comet's course: she is the world, I have sought out. Round her I have cast the loop of my orbit, and am held fast and safe; she is my Sea of Tranquility, my Milky Way, bearded with Berenice's Hair. I am a new constellation, pegged out in the sky. I am joy. Complete. For ever. — Rosie Garland

People recognize me, I have scripts, and auditions. And I meet great people. — Berenice Bejo

My parents were not pushy or anything like that. I think my mom was still expecting me to be an astronaut, but now she is very happy that I'm not doing that. — Berenice Bejo

I really enjoyed being Peppy Miller. She was an amazing character and her energy followed me everywhere. When I talk about her I want to be her again. — Berenice Bejo

The difference between the extras here and in France is the French extras read books. Actually, they hide the book and pretend that they're acting. Here, you can see everybody wants his break. — Berenice Bejo

I read Gloria Swanson's autobiography just because I wanted to know what it was like in the time. — Berenice Bejo

What the human eye observes causally and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity. — Berenice Abbott

It's very difficult in France to get access to castings when you don't have any relationships. — Berenice Marlohe

I feel very honored and special really. You can't imagine, to arrive at the Oscars when you arrive so low, and you can't go further than the Oscars. — Berenice Bejo

If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest. — Berenice Abbott

I totally heard by chance that they were doing the casting for a James Bond movie, and that one of the auditions was taking place in Paris. So I tried myself to contact every name involved in the movie I could possibly find on the IMDb! — Berenice Marlohe

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is. — Berenice Abbott

I never thought about how I didn't have a cell phone or I'm in 2011. I was just so happy to be able to be a character in the 30s and there are these actresses that I really liked in the 40s, 50s and 60s in American movies that I've seen since I was a little girl. But you don't really think like that when you prepare for a role. — Berenice Bejo

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph. — Berenice Abbott

Here, you go to the supermarket and you have wipes to clean your hands before shopping. No, we don't have that in France, but we recycle. — Berenice Bejo

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it. — Berenice Abbott

I admire actors who are bold and try to go forward over the cliche and propose something original to the audience. — Berenice Marlohe

Help us, Lord, to conquer sin out of love to Thee. Help some dear strugglers that have been mastered by sin sometimes, and they are struggling against it; give them the victory, Lord, and when the battle gets very sharp, and they are tempted to give way a little, help them to be very firm and very strong, never giving up hope in the Lord Jesus, and resolving that if they perish they will perish at His feet and nowhere else but there. — Berenice Aguilera

I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people's ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea. The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it. — Berenice Abbott

I spent hours on the internet looking at how glamorous actresses winked and how they would put their hand on their waist, and I was told to look at how they would walk in a room and how her body takes place of everything. — Berenice Bejo

I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her. — Berenice Abbott

A character is never entirely white or black, there's never entirely right or wrong. You have to realize sometimes you face something, and then you change your mind, or then you realize you were wrong. — Berenice Bejo

I fell in love with Crawford because when she was twenty or twenty five, she would dance and talk and sing and do the things that Peppy's character needs to do. — Berenice Bejo

Marlene Dietrich for the way there was something so unique about her - the way she entered into a frame and everybody looks at her and the way she winks and looks up. — Berenice Bejo

I'm okay. Nobody's bothering me. Everyone's very kind, and very polite. I don't feel like my whole life changed. — Berenice Bejo

I tried to find a character and how I would be an American actress in the 30s. But if this was a talking movie [The Artist], I'm sure she would be exactly the same for me. — Berenice Bejo

Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death. — Berenice Abbott

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time ... Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism-real life-the now. — Berenice Abbott

Maybe I'll put my iPod in two minutes before. But truly, I've listened to actors say that they loved to listen to music before a shot, and I really understand that now because it puts you in the mood and gives you energy. — Berenice Bejo

Of course, when you work on a character, you try to understand her. You feel that everything she does has a reason. — Berenice Bejo

I know, but what is it all about? People loose and at
the same time caught. Caught and loose. All these people
and you don't know what joins them up. There's bound to
be some sort of reason and connection. Yet somehow I
can't seem to name it. I don't know."
"If you did you would be God," said Berenice. "Didn't
you know that? — Carson McCullers

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light ... — Berenice Abbott

Ever since the movie premiered at Cannes, I've had a sudden surge of scripts and interest. — Berenice Bejo

He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour. — Theodore Dreiser

Right now I'm the most famous silent movie actress in the world and I want to keep that for me. So I hope there's not going to be any other silent movies. — Berenice Bejo

I looked at a lot of photos from Hollywood in the '20s, photographs of silent movies being filmed all over the world which are very specific and very evocative. Berenice, the lead actress, is my wife. She really followed the same path with me. — Michel Hazanavicius

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. — Berenice Abbott

I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I'll be there until the last minute, fighting. — Berenice Abbott

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see. — Berenice Abbott

Photography helps people to see. — Berenice Abbott

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own. — Berenice Abbott

I connected very much with all the work of Joan Crawford because she started as a flapper. She used to dance and sing and she was very cute. She had something that was so different from what she is at the end of her life and she started in the silent movies and then went into the talkies. — Berenice Bejo

The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will; but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in. — Berenice Abbott

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity. — Berenice Abbott

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself. — Berenice Abbott

From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable. — Italo Calvino

I'm very passionate about art, music, drawing, acting, so I'd like to have the chance to get the larger choice regarding acting. — Berenice Marlohe

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. — Berenice Abbott

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world. — Berenice Abbott

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document. — Berenice Abbott

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art. — Berenice Abbott

Even in the very beginning when she would bump into George Valentine and people would start taking pictures of her, she never thought, 'I'm with George Valentine. I need to get a picture with him.' She's like 'oh that's funny. Everyone's taking pictures!' — Berenice Bejo

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring. — Berenice Abbott

As an actor, you think you have to go really far and deep and cry and yell to be good in a scene. Sometimes that's not the point. — Berenice Bejo

What to me is anathema - a corpse-like, outmoded hangover - is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium ... Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior? — Berenice Abbott

The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about ... — Berenice Abbott

Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine. — Berenice Abbott

We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don't know why. But we caught any how. I was born Berenice. You Born Franky. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. I'm caught worse than you is. Because I'm Black, because I'm colored. — Carson McCullers

I think the approach of the character for us is the same in a silent movie as in a talking movie because we had balance, we had lines to learn. — Berenice Bejo

Suppose we took a thousand negatives ...
combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city - that would be my favorite picture. — Berenice Abbott

I guess I'm the perfect young lead actress. I'm not Chloe Sevigny - I'm not really a character actress. Some actors have "character" faces. — Berenice Bejo

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue. — Berenice Abbott

Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that Oedipus or Berenice or Hamlet or The Three Sisters performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives them a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all. — Peter Brook

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one to do it. — Berenice Abbott

In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies. — Berenice Bejo

The wind fluttering the pennants atop the outer keep and teasing Berenice's hair carried the loamy smell of damp earth, the fresh scent of the river, and, even now, a ghostly chemical astringency. The miasma wafted from the battlefield. — Ian Tregillis

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable. — Berenice Abbott

Well as I said in France I didn't get auditions, and it's very difficult to get an agent in France because they conduct the business in a strange way. — Berenice Marlohe

I haven't seen too many images that have impressed me! — Berenice Abbott

Sometimes we had to improvise. I hate to improvise because I felt like I couldn't find words. — Berenice Bejo

Looking for art, the theme gets lost.
Finding the theme is finding art. — Berenice Abbott

The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past. — Berenice Abbott

'Bond girl' is a bit abstract, what does that mean, you see a girl in a bikini? — Berenice Marlohe

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That's the only way they are going to find themselves. They can't do it in their heads - they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film. — Berenice Abbott

Listen," F. Jasmine said. "What I've been trying to say is this. Doesn't it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can't ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? — Carson McCullers

Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself. — Berenice Abbott

I'm 50% Asian actually, so yes I was born in Paris but I feel more international than French so I can't talk about French women. — Berenice Marlohe

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, - not the material of my every-day existence
but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself. — Edgar Allan Poe

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today. — Berenice Abbott

For us, as actors, and even for the director, it gave us a sense of authenticity to what we were doing because we were talking about Hollywood and we were in Hollywood. — Berenice Bejo

And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie. — Berenice Marlohe

What we need of equipment is this: let it possess as good a structure as the real-life content that surrounds us. We need more simplifications to free us for seeing. — Berenice Abbott

Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer. — Berenice Abbott

It's a once-in-a-lifetime event for all of us, something like this. — Berenice Bejo

Self-conscious artiness is fatal, but it certainly would not hurt to study composition in general. Having a basic understanding of composition would help construct a better organized image. — Berenice Abbott

I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer. — Berenice Abbott