Jodorowsky Quotes & Sayings

When I'm tired, I see industrial pictures. But I'll see one every two months. If I see one every day, I'll become an idiot. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I don't want to just love my family; I want to love all of humanity. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I don't believe in failing. I have dignity. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

We are all working for the immortality of the human consciousness. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I don't see myself as a moviemaker only, you know? When I can do a picture, I do. But I don't work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Books are finished. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

My wife is 37 years younger than me. I don't feel the difference. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Oh, Buenos Aires, I have traveled around the world, but I've never been separated from you," said Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. And Saint Thomas said, "A friendship that can end has never been a true friendship." In — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I think the art of filmmaking is something you learn through actions, by doing it, not by learning theories. And as you do it, your mind starts to change. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Miracles are like stones: they are everywhere, offering up their beauty, but hardly anyone concedes value to them. We live in a reality where prodigies abound but are seen only by those who have developed their perception of them. Without this perception everything is banal, marvelous events are seen as chance, and one progresses through life without possessing the key that is gratitude. When something extraordinary happens it is seen as a natural phenomenon that we can exploit like parasites, without giving anything in return. But miracles require an exchange; I must make that which is given to me bear fruit for others. If one is not united with oneself, the wonder cannot be captured. Miracles are never performed or provoked: they are discovered. If someone who believes himself to be blind takes off his dark glasses, he will see the light. That darkness is the prison of the rational. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

For me they are no different, reality and dreams. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I tweet 15 times a day to keep my brain stimulated. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

During these past years, not being able to speak with you, I dedicated myself to reviewing, within myself, the sacred books I know by heart. I had the idea I should summarize them in a single volume. Then, in a single chapter, then in a single page, and finally in a single sentence. This sentence is the greatest thing I can teach you. It seems simple, but if you understand it, you will never have to study again." The Rabbi recited it. And life, from that moment on, changed for Alejandro. "If God is not here, He is nowhere; this instant itself is perfection. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures: because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I realized once again that what I believed myself to be was an arbitrary deformation, a rational mask floating in the infinite unexplored internal shadows. Later, I understood that diseases do not actually sicken us; they sicken what we believe ourselves to be. Health is achieved by overcoming prohibitions, quitting paths that are not right for us, ceasing to pursue imposed ideals, and becoming ourselves: the impersonal consciousness that does not define itself. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

For me, surrealism is in my blood; it's not an effort. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The planet is ill, everyone knows that. But I need to be optimistic, otherwise I would just be adding to the negativity. So every night I come on Madrid TV and read a piece of good news. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I was raping Frank Herbert but with love. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

We may overindulge at times, but we then control ourselves and go back to a more moderate diet. There is a mudra that illustrates this situation quite well: "If the animal leaves the flock, I take it back to the flock. If it leaves again, I take it back again." Spiritual — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I never wanted to study art. And I don't think you need to study art if you are an artist. It's even dangerous to go to school. You need to do whatever you want, as you want. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

When I brought 'El Topo' to New York, no one understood the picture. But John Lennon understood. John and Yoko Ono, they presented 'El Topo' in the United States; they introduced it. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don't like that. I think this is some kind of fascism - 'You need to react like that.' No. No. It's not like this; everyone needs to react as he can. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I hated Peter O'Toole. I wanted to kill that guy! When they said he was dead, I was happy. People said, 'Poor Peter O'Toole.' I was happy! — Alejandro Jodorowsky

For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The world is not violent. But there is a lot of violence in it. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

My films are completely new. I am not similar to anybody in the history of movies. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Death is an art, you know. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am not a commercial industry creator. I don't believe in making art to make money. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Failure doesn't exist. It's only a change of direction. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I was like a mutant when I was a boy. I learned to read when I was four years old; it was like a miracle. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

French Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin would never have become Gauguin if he had not followed this principle. He was a bank employee for a good part of his life, until the day he decided he was an artist. That day he left the bank and became a genius painter. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

It's not the same thing to make a work - a film, a book, a play - about youth as it is to make one about old age. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

If God gives you chocolate, you open your mouth, no? — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Revolutions are of no us;, it is necessary to work on transforming the brain: on sowing a different knowledge/awareness, on creating a new conscience, that is like a magic box full of brains. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

To be an artist, you need to play inside your work. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I want to show the world that it is possible. It's possible to remember your self. To open your mind. To open your heart. To open your creativity. To live with less, but to live well. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I've seen 'Hamlet' many times, and Hamlet, he was just a hideous neurotic; he never changes. He doubts - all the way to the end, all the way until when he dies, he doubts. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Arabs have a God, the Jews have another, and the Catholics have another! And they're all fighting to maintain that they worship the one real God. Idiots! — Alejandro Jodorowsky

In Chile, they have no movies. They have awful popular movies. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The imagination wants to construct the new worlds, no? Creativity is a solution. If I ask you, "What is your goal in life? How many years do you have to live before to die? How many years do you have? And what you will do with these years you have?" You have pressure there. "How you will realize a good life? How? Tell me!" Then, you start to open your mind. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Accepting death is a massive problem for everybody. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don't do it. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

'Santa Sangre' is the picture I love the best, myself, because 'El Topo' and 'The Holy Mountain' I made with my head, and 'Santa Sangre' I made with my feelings, with my heart. It's an emotional picture. And it's more real for me, that picture. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am an honest artist. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The tarot is sacred. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying 'And then I shall have wings and antennae,' there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I like Hollywood movies. I like them like I like to eat scrambled eggs; I like them for fun. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures ... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Once, Jodorowsky fired George Harrison from acting in The Holy Mountain because he'd backed out of the scene "when the thief shows his asshole and there is a hippopotamus." Jodorowsky pleaded, "It would be a big, big lesson for humanity if you could finish with your ego and show your asshole!" but Harrison said no. — Anonymous

What could be the utopia for the present age?
To begin with, I would want all of human order to make a partnership, beginning in schools. It is atrocious that the children leave the partnership and go to be educated by a professor, just a man or a woman. This negates partnership. Classes should be taught by couples of both sexes, and children should be educated by a man and a woman ...
... not necessarily a husband and wife. This is what I would do as a first political measure to improve social life: all human activities would have to be carried out in complimentary pairs. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The worse the newspapers speak of the world, the better I feel. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I always think that art is a form of sacrifice. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

If the picture is not an artistic picture, it's show, like television. Television series are very funny, but it's a collective production. An industrial art. A car is not made by a person, it's made by a group of creators, only to go to the market to buy your cigarettes. That is a car - they are not a big art, they are a little art. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Society feeds terror and is in turn terrorized; we are afraid to lose, so we consume. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Every mind has another vision of reality. There is not a common reality. Every person thinks he is like the others, but every person is different, living in his own psychology. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating ...
... Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken's foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

My grandfather was a very mystical guy who travelled from Argentina to Chile, across the mountains with a donkey, carrying the Torah. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

When the bullseye becomes as big as an elephant in your mind, you won't be able to miss it. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I wanted to be loved by my father. I could do anything to be loved by my father. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

In Mexico, when we want to speak deep secrets, we drink pulgue together. It is a drink made from the cactus plant, and when you take the bottle from your mouth, it leaves a string behind, between the mouth and the bottle, like a spider's web. It shows that the truth sticks inside. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The worst grotesque situations: believing one knows oneself, believing one knows everything about some topic, believing one has judged with absolute impartiality, believing one will love and be loved forever. In conversation, people think one thing and, in trying to communicate it, say something else. The interlocutor hears one thing, but understands something different. When answering, one does not respond to what the other person initially thought, nor to what the other person said, but to what one has understood. The final result: a conversation between deaf people who do not even know how to listen to themselves. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Failure doesn't mean anything, it just means changing paths. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I don't have interest in life. Life has an interest in me. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I have always thought that, of all the arts, the cinema is the most complete art. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

In movies, images cost - if you want a big image, it takes more money. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don't ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it! — Alejandro Jodorowsky

One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

George Harrison wanted to play the thief in 'Holy Mountain.' — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again. — Alejandro Jodorowsky