Collage Quotes & Sayings

Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft-a whore's arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind-why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured-for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall. — Lorrie Moore

My writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything. — Michael Giacchino

Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best things to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we're doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change — Michelle Obama

I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative. — David Shields

The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images. — Pedro Almodovar

Sometimes a collage element I hit upon can inspire the entire drawing. — Laura Owens

Collage is a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it. — Donald Kuspit

I was just a big fan of tattoos always growing up, and I wanted something cool that symbolizes what I've been through in my life, and everything on my chest and my back is like a collage. — Kevin Durant

I grabbed the napkin wound around the silverware in front of me because paper was my lifeline and I needed to touch it, to know that maybe when I went home later, I could collage him and then it would all make sense, he would make sense. I hoped my fingers would remember the exact quality of the sunlight on his forehead, the shadows under his eyes. — Heather Demetrios

Let's just say, if I weren't a model, I'd be a walking collage. I see my body as a blank canvas that's aching to be decorated; I find it all very fascinating. — Abbey Lee Kershaw

I hadn't realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been, — Jon Ronson

Time held no meaning as my mind darted in and out of memories. Past and present collided to create a full-sensory collage out of my life: playing hide-n-seek with my best friends Luke - who always cheated by walking through walls when he was about to be caught - and Lucy; Mr. Caldrin critiquing my sketches and offering ideas to make them more realistic; targets changing faces, blending into the same person, their thoughts rippling through my mind like waves. Through it all, a demon stalked me from the shadows of my memories, never quite showing its face, but crouching, waiting.
And then I dreamed ... — Kimberly Kinrade

Television is becoming a collage - there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different. — David Hockney

Whether you're aware of it or not, any kind of collage idea becomes a part of how you see the world once you incorporate media and internet and video games and all these things. — Beck

I always felt that with an Antoine Doinel film, Truffaut was taking a vacation, that Francois could relax when making a Doinel film. All of the language came to him very easily. 'The 400 Blows,' I felt, was a collage of all his childhood experiences. Every time he felt an Antoine Doinel film was necessary, he'd make one. — Jean-Pierre Leaud

to Vaneigem and the Situationists who by shrewd use of collage and juxtaposition exposed both the poverty and richness of slogans, and the thinly veiled hypocrisy of a "spectacular" society which by not respecting words abuses people, and by insulting the intelligence creates a state of political cretinisation in which the many and various forms of authoritarian control dominate. — Alexis Lykiard

I liked to scrapbook and collage a whole lot in high school. I'm always ripping things out of magazines, and always collecting quotes from the Internet. When I was 17, I loved AIM. I was obsessed with my buddy list! — Jenna Ushkowitz

Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind. — James Rosenquist

On every Bright Eyes record, there's some kind of sound collage that begins it. Some of them have dialogue, some don't. I like it because it can kind of slow down the attention span a bit. It's a way to draw you in to the rest of the record. — Conor Oberst

I have titles floating around in my head; I have sculptures floating around in my head. It's like a collage. — Damien Hirst

One of the walls of my bedroom was a collage of about 15 years of baseball photos. I would cut out the baseball pictures from every issue and I had this huge montage of thousands of pictures. — Curt Schilling

On the great canvas of time
We all create our own masterpiece.
Choreographing our steps across minutes and hours
Dancing over the days
Painting pictures over months and
Writing our stories on the years.
Singing our songs that echo across eons.
We are all a thread in the talent tapestry.
A snapshot in the cosmic, collective collage. — Michele Jennae

We are a collage of our interests, our influences, our inspirations, all the fragmentary impressions we've collected by being alive and awake to the world. Who we are is simply a finely-curated catalogue of those. — Maria Popova

The beauty of the collage technique is that you're using sounds that have never met and were never supposed to meet. You introduce them to each other, at first they're a bit shy, clumsy, staring at their shoes. But you can sense there's something there. So you cut and paste a little bit and by the end of the song you can spot them in the corner, holding hands. — Jens Lekman

We don't sell technical drawings except when they are incorporated into a drawing or a collage. — Christo

I have a lot of tattoos. I probably have over 100 tattoos. I don't know. It's just a mural ... a collage. — Tyga

This is all very regrettable, though it isn't really, and I wish to assure you that I, in no way, derive any personal satisfaction from any of this, even though I so obviously do. If you feel the need to vent any more of your frustration, please feel free to do so, as I intend to build a collage of this moment and I'd like some more amusing anecdotes to go along with it. — Derek Landy

Life,
perhaps less a document than an impression,
conveyed through partial glances,
stream-of-consciousness juxtapositions,
unpredictable rhythms,
a collage of sound,
a conscientious diarist,
a career of blackmail and scandal culminated in murder,
a blind man with a will of iron and a nervous system of gossamer. — Brian D'Ambrosio

They exchanged notes, like children. My grandfather made his out of newspaper clippings and dropped them in her woven baskets, into which he knew only she would dare stick a hand. Meet me under the wooden bridge and I will show you things you have never, ever seen. The "M" was taken from the army that would take his mother's life: GERMAN FRONT ADVANCES ON SOVIET BORDER; the "eet" from their approaching warships: NAZI FLEET DEFEATS FRENCH AT LESACS; the "me" from the peninsula they were blue-eyeing: GERMANS SURROUND CRIMEA; the "und" from too little, too late: AMERICAN WAR FUNDS REACH ENGLAND; the "er" from the dog of dogs: HITLER RENDERS NONAGGRESSION PACT INOPERATIVE ... and so on, and so on, each note a collage of love that could never be, and a war that could — Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data. — David Shields

In this way Byron's take on the human condition becomes closer to the fractured collage of 20th century existentialists: a conflicted human nature posited within a harsh and painful environment where self-less compassion is essential to human progress, but is rewarded with torture and suffering. — George Gordon Byron

They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Collage is like a hall of mirrors. Every direction you look, you see something different and visually stimulating. — Nita Leland

We each are artists of the self, creating a collage -- a new and original work of art -- out of scraps and fragments of identifications. The people with whom we identify are, positively or negatively, always important to us. Our feelings toward them are, in some way, always intense. — Judith Viorst

It's always helpful to look outside of the web for your inspiration, to places where you might not at first expect to find a solution. The world is a collage of inspiration, from newspapers, magazine publishing, and advertising to product design, architecture and the fine arts. — Andy Clark

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history. — Michael Ondaatje

No, my step-daughter just opened a theatre school for children, I have another daughter who works in the record industry and another who is going back to collage and I have two little ones at home. — Rosanne Cash

From when I was a really small girl on, I would pick every fabric, every color on the walls, and I was always redecorating. Like once every couple of months I would redecorate my room. I had a full wall that was all collage - the entire wall - when I was in junior high. And then it would kind of morph with me as I was growing. — Chloe Sevigny

Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, let's say, a tramp vomiting in the sewere. You know, and next door to the picture Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. C. W. Jones on the subway going to work. You know, any kind of picture. Just make a collage of pictures. — Bob Dylan

Rapid-collage prevents any elevating movement toward a fixed goal. To 'be nowhere' is to let oneself be. — Joshua L. Goldberg

Editing is a natural extension of the collage making. It's actually one of the few areas that women were able to excel in in the film industry from the beginning. — Rachel True

If I take that person and play them as a record I'm becoming not only a conductor and composer of collage, but at the same time I'm looking at a whole layer of what goes into copyright law, who owns those memories, who owns the way that that sound gets remixed and transformed and above all how much fun it is to actually just mess with other people's stuff. — DJ Spooky

I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God. — Spalding Gray

Aomori Water is a sound collage piece made in 1998, in Aomori Japan. I was in a residency with other artists. A Japanese sculptor was making a round house and wanted a sound piece to play in it. I recorded some very gentle waves lapping the beach, for the first part. And a very small mountain stream, flowing, for the second part. I layered 8 tracks. This was the first work that I did in ProTools. — Phill Niblock

I'm lying on Cash's chest, tracing his tattoo.
"What does this mean?" I whisper.
"It's the Chinese symbol for awesome," he teases lightly.
I giggle. "If it's not, which I imagine it isn't, then it should be."
"Are you paying me a compliment? I just want to be sure, so I don't miss it."
I slap his ribs. "You make it sound like I'm mean and horrible because I don't throw myself at your feet."
"You don't have to throw yourself at my feet. Although if you want to, I'm sure I can think of something for you to do while you're down there."
I look up at him and he's waggling his eyebrows again.
"I'm sure you could." Shaking my head, I settle back onto his chest and resume tracing the ink shapes. "Seriously, what do they mean?"
Cash is quiet for so long I begin to think he's not going to answer me. But then he finally speaks.
"It's a collage of things that remind me of my family. — M. Leighton

If we want to make meaning, we need to make art. Cook, write, draw, doodle, paint, scrapbook, take pictures, collage, knit, rebuild an engine, sculpt, dance, decorate, act, sing - it doesn't matter. As long as we're creating, we're cultivating meaning. — Brene Brown

In Paris in the late '40s, I started making my first reliefs. They are separate panels. I wanted to do something coming out of the wall, almost like a collage. I did a lot of white reliefs when I started because I liked antique reliefs, really old stuff. — Ellsworth Kelly

Kindred's tale is a romantic, mature, and lyrical collage of heaven, hell, and a magical royal legend. The combination is divinely - and demonically - inspired. — Alethea Kontis

Being unemployed, Kurt set in motion a routine that he would follow for the rest of his life. He would rise at around noon and eat a brunch of sorts. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese was his favorite food. After eating, he would spend the rest of the day doing one of three things: watching television, which he did unceasingly; practicing his guitar, which he did for hours a day, usually while watching TV; or creating some kind of art project, be it a painting, collage, or three-dimensional installation. This last activity was never formal - he rarely identified himself as an artist - yet he spent hours in this manner. — Charles R. Cross

Peter used to say that an artist's job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble. — Chuck Palahniuk

Learn more about yourself! Make a self-esteem collage using pictures of other people you wish you were. — Amy Sedaris

I know you think I didn't know," he says, flipping through the pages and opening it to the middle of the book where there is a collage of all the X-Men, "but sometimes, you forget to shut the blinds."
( ... )
"Zo, I dont think I could ever hate you. You hurt me, but whenever I saw you grab one of those books and duck under here, I knew you were probably hurting too, and I'd let it go."
"Just like that?"
"I guess I make it sound easier than it was. But yeah, I'd let it go because I knew it wasn't the girl at school under this blanket. It was my friend. — Cassie Mae

Here I am, the artist, the person, the black woman, and the stereotype. I'm using myself and it has nothing to do with my muses or other women. It has to do with me. You see parts of my body moving, very collage like, flashing, and not speaking, just laying on a couch, looking out at the viewer. — Mickalene Thomas

Directing is like putting together a collage. — Ethan Hawke

Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life. — Fran Lebowitz

I'm being given a little bit of credit now as being a viable collage artist, which some people think is ridiculous. Like this guy who said, "Wait a minute: You had an art show where you just cut out pictures and then glued them back together?" And I said, "Yeah, that's pretty much what it is." There's more to it than that. It's about having the eye for detail, moving things from one environment and reassembling them into new environments ... Everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well. — Robert Pollard

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? — William S. Burroughs

It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage. — Val Kilmer

My stuff is generally quite collage-y anyway. So it's sort-of suited to gathering raw materials like shooting actors, then making stills or animating characters, then just bringing them all together in a 3D space. That process is very close to my 2D work anyway. — Dave McKean

When you talking about funk music you just talking about a collage of a lot of different types of music. They used strings, they had brass, they had vocalist. — Killer Mike

dreams are a tremendous condensation that fits the maximum amount of meaning in a collage of often conflicting or strangely appearing symbols. In — Steven G. Fox

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive ... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement. — William S. Burroughs

Beauty is so rare a th
Sing a new song
Real
Music
A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A
Visiting card
- from 15 False Propositions Against God [1958] — Jack Spicer

I've got pages and pages of snippets of stuff, and if Max [Hershenow] sends me a track to write to I'll go through all the stuff and the initial reaction of gut and how it makes me feel and I'll sort of go from there and start pulling my favourite pieces of my lyrics and that will be a very literal word collage and from there I'll sculpt it for and whatever reason the song sort of presents itself. It's a bizarre process. — Lizzy Plapinger

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind's sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature's plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story. — Shane Black

Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information ... explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. — Jill Bolte Taylor

I've always liked making things that don't deny the medium that they're made in. If it's collage, I'm happy for it to look like that. If it's a film made with computers, I don't mind that it looks like a film made with computers as long as it still has a feeling or a mood or an atmosphere that is relevant. — Dave McKean

I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts. — Thomas F. Wilson

Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them. — Max Ernst

Life is like a collage so learn quickly — Silver Ann Lee

The best V-Day gift I've ever received was a personalized photo collage. — Candice Swanepoel

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation. — Ellsworth Kelly

The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory. — Jonathan Lethem

A dream collage is pictures of your goals. It is like your future photo album. — Bo Bennett

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross. — Michael Ondaatje

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together. — Hilary Mantel

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation — Robert Motherwell

Anyone who's ever put a stamp on an envelope or a note on their refrigerator knows what it's like to make a collage. There's no esoteric technique. — Elliott Hundley

Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period. — Max Ernst

How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random. — John Guare

Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, tortured and hypnotized me, and I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world - as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher. — Svetlana Alexievich

I had to tell him we were like a collage. Pieces that could be put back together in a new way, a better way. If I didn't say it now, I never would. — Heather Demetrios

When we look back into our lives we see that our life is but a collection, a collage of these moments which take the shape of images, images which lower our spirits, images which inspire, images which help us remember the people that have come along our way, touched us and silently left, images that go on to become memories and leave a lasting impression as long as we are here, as long as we are here to be. — Chirag Tulsiani

In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable. — Andrei Codrescu

We occupy a space of our own creation-a collage compounded by bits and pieces of actuality arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our fears, our memories, and our anticipations. — Willard Gaylin

As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers. — John Henrik Clarke

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it. — Roy Lichtenstein

The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with. — Talib Kweli

In collage you're doing it in stages so you're not actually doing it right there. You first of all draw it on the paper, then you cut it up, then you paste it down, then you change it, then you shove it about, then you may paint bits of it over, so actually you're not making the picture there and then, you're making it through a process, so it's not so spontaneous. — Paula Rego

The God Delusion is a rather disorganized collage of arguments and pastiche of assertions which cannot be said to advance those ideas or enhance their critical edge, but rather harnesses them in the service of the advocacy of atheism. — Alister E. McGrath

The collages I never wanted to sell. I thought it was a very private thing, so I kept the collages. Then, in the end, I had a big collage in the Pinault Collection in Venice and the director of the [Centre] Pompidou said, "Did you make big collages like this in the '60s?" I said yes, so he came to the studio and said, "Let's make an exhibition in the Pompidou." — Erro

Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage ... an assimilated historical record of man's quest to understand the divine. — Dan Brown

Of all the nouns we use to disguise the hollowness of the human condition, none is more influential than "myself". It consists of a collage of still images - name, gender, nationality, profession, enthusiasms, relationships - which are renovated from time to time, but otherwise are each a relic from one particular experience or another. The defining teaching of the Buddhist tradition, that of non-self, is merely pointing out the limitations of this reflexive view we hold of ourselves. It's not that the self does not exist, but that it is as cobbled together and transient as everything else. [With] the practice of meditation, ... we can begin to see how each artifact of the mind is raised and lowered to view, like so many flashcards. But we can also glimpse, once in a while, the sleight-of-hand shuffling the card and pulling them off the deck. Behind the objects lies a process. Self is a process. Self is a verb. — Andrew Olendzki

DJ culture is all about collage - sampling, splicing, dicing - everything is part of the mix, and there are no boundaries between sound sources. When you apply the same logic to the environment, there's a lot of room for mapping sampling techniques to the environment itself. — DJ Spooky

Ryan Chase was my eighth-grade collage, aspirational and wide-eyed. But Max was the first bite of grilled cheese on a snowy day, the easy fit of my favorite jeans, that one old song that made it onto every playlist. Peanut-butter Girl Scout cookies instead of an ornate cake. Not glamorous or idealized or complicated. Just me. — Emery Lord

I think there were some programs but in those days art programs were kind of basic. You would do drawing and simple collage type work. But at home I was beginning to get interested in doing my own thing as well. I'm not sure what inspired this, but I became very interested in decorating things. — Paul Smith

Collage-making, for me, is basically an act of painting, allowing me to indulge in an appetite for immediacy. — Abe Ajay

When I became tired of oil painting at one stage, I used collage and this proved to be influential in the design and composition of my later works. — Myfanwy Pavelic

I believe you need to be educated on what you want to do in life, but I don't believe you necessarily need collage to get there. — Will Smith