Serra Quotes & Sayings

We found vines of a large size, and in some cases quite loaded with grapes; we also found an abundance of roses, which appeared to be like those of Castile. — Junipero Serra

I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct. — Richard Serra

But I'll try to immerse myself in as many of the formal characteristics of site as possible in the landscape. — Richard Serra

I think that everything changes when it goes through the Mac; it's cheap. I think people then don't pay too much importance to the take, if you can do 40 takes. — Jaume Collet-Serra

I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers. — Richard Serra

We are all on stage, my dear. Sometimes we forget our lines, but luckily an offstage helper can whisper our lines to us until we get back on track. — Maria La Serra

Promenade was totally driven by the context. The internal relationships of measurement and placement related to the central axis of the site. The placement of the rectangular plates followed a strict logic in that the plates tilted away and towards the center line in an asymmetrical counterpoint. However, the perception of the sculpture contradicts the logic of its relation to the site. As you walk inbetween the plates you see fragments, you see the work in part, you cannot grasp the whole. — Richard Serra

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton. — Richard Serra

Anamorphic is very difficult because the distance from the lens to the person to focus is very long so you need a lot of distance from the camera to the person so that means that you need a lot of space. — Jaume Collet-Serra

I think video is very useful, but it's very useful when you want a certain reality. — Jaume Collet-Serra

When you're a kid and you see gangsters living the life, you kind of want to be like that. — Jaume Collet-Serra

But you have to take all of those things, you have to take into consideration the paths, the roadways, how much cloud cover there is, how much foliage cover there is, whether there are streams, all of that comes into play. — Richard Serra

Yes, she is." His eyes remained on Olivia, but she wasn't aware he was watching her. "With art, I believe anything created with profound heart is captured compulsively beautifully. — Maria La Serra

The hard part on the subway is that you have, let's say, eight hours, but you have to hit these deadlines. From here to here, you can use this part. From this time to this time, you can use that part, and you have to hit them and it gets very stressful. — Jaume Collet-Serra

The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes. — Richard Serra

There was something very fishy about Riley Bay. — Serra Elinsen

Keep your eye on the prize but enjoy the journey. — Matt Serra

I think it's very interesting for a director that enjoys thrillers and mysteries like I do to have the challenge to do that. — Jaume Collet-Serra

Dear girl with the red scarf,
Love was never meant to be conquered. You have to surrender to it.
Trust me, after all, I am Mr. Universe.
— Maria La Serra

Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful. — Richard Serra

You have to offer sort of an evolution visually and do things like you've never seen before, like a fight between two men in a toilet on an airplane which was very exciting. — Jaume Collet-Serra

What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are. — Richard Serra

How can this be real?" I whispered. "I mean you ... you ... where you come from. Your world. It is so beyond everything I've ever known. And you would ... you would take me to the Pumpkin Ball?"
"Try and stop me. — Serra Elinsen

I think this, I think basically I'm not interested in people following my work or making work like my work. — Richard Serra

Father Fernando did every thing in his power to assist the sick; and although he arrived much reduced in flesh, he did not become ill, and is now well. — Junipero Serra

Those who dared criticize Serra and his Franciscans for their treatment of the Native Americans risked being crushed by the power of the Roman Catholic Church, with its power of excommunication, or being literally torn to pieces by the Inquisition, which could conduct an investigation using horrendous means of torture against anyone who dared challenge the church or its hierarchy. — Elias Castillo

Just kill me. My life is nothing without you. Drive me mad. Let me be your sustenance. Eat my soul. You're ... you're tearing me apart! — Serra Elinsen

If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're passing on only a residue of your concerns ... You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the work. — Richard Serra

Riley Bay wasn't human.
But if he wasn't human, then what was he? An alien, sent to Earth to learn about humanity in preparation for an invasion? Riley was certainly weird enough to be an alien, but I didn't see why the mother ship would send him to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in the guise of a high schooler. — Serra Elinsen

The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it's like coming home for me. — Richard Serra

It is but another instance of injustice, Fray Felipe said. For twenty years we, of the missions, have been subjected to it, and it grows. The sainted Junipero Serra invaded this land when other men feared, and at San Diego de Alcala he built the first mission of what became a chain, thus giving an empire to the world. Our mistake was that we prospered. We did the work, and others reap the advantages. They began taking out mission-lands from us, lands we had cultivated, which had formed a wilderness and which my brothers had turned into gardens and orchards. They robbed us of worldly goods. And not content with that they now are persecuting us. The mission-empire is doomed, caballero. The time is not far distant when mission roofs will fall in and walls crumble away. Some day people will look at the ruins and wonder how such a thing could come to pass. — Johnston McCulley

She was magic, a direct light - the kind that seeps through in places that didn't exist inside him anymore. The light he thought he lost forever, but Nick realized we don't lose the light, we absorb it, and with Olivia he wanted to absorb every small speck of it. — Maria La Serra

Good thing it's a fight and not a modeling contest or you'd be f#cked. — Matt Serra

Serra High school, to me, was my most enjoyable time for me in my entire life. That was the only time I was free. We just played baseball because it was fun. — Barry Bonds

Art is not democratic. It is not for the people. — Richard Serra

Camera's are cheap. It's the lenses that are expensive. — Jaume Collet-Serra

You're sure this is what you want?" I search her eyes for doubt, fear, uncertainty, but all I see is that fire. Ten hells
"I'm sure"
"Then I'll find a way — Sabaa Tahir

Here I found those who had set out before me, both by sea and land, except those who have died. — Junipero Serra

Don't look so worried. Most successful missions are just a series of barely averted disasters. — Sabaa Tahir

Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading. — Richard Serra

Producers and studios want to make movies that are more appealing internationally and I think that you have to use your different cultures as an advantage to be able to make those movies. — Jaume Collet-Serra

Unless we make revolutionary reforms, some day - in some unknown serra - some unknown Fidel Castro will rise up in Brazil. — Janio Quadros

Your eye is a muscle, you have to keep it in shape and the more you draw, the more you see. — Richard Serra

I was in analysis and I told my analyst I wanted to be the best sculptor in the world and he said, 'Richard, calm down.' — Richard Serra

And certainly the history of public sculpture has been disastrous but that doesn't mean it ought not to continue and the only way it even has a chance to continue is if the work gets out into the public. — Richard Serra

Here are also the two vessels, but the San Carlos without sailors, all having died of the scurvy, except two. — Junipero Serra

Jiu-Jitsu is my therapy, my passion, my life. — Matt Serra

Shooting digitally would not have been easier. Cameras are the same size. I always shoot on film unless I have a reason not to, which I haven't had yet. — Jaume Collet-Serra

Perceiving the order of nature to be that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue, I am willing to hope it may have ordained that the fall of the wicked shall be the rise of the good.
To J. Correa de Serra, Monticello, Apr. 19, 1814 — Thomas Jefferson

They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is. — Richard Serra

He stood there watching for a moment, not able to move. Even with her mascara running down her face and her hair beginning to frizz, she was still by far the most beautiful girl he'd ever laid eyes on. It was quite simple, wasn't it? This great affection he had for Olivia was so overwhelming he chose to walk away instead of being brutally honest with himself. — Maria La Serra

Work out of your work. Don't work out of anybody else's work. — Richard Serra

For me, it was the challenge of doing a movie that is in one location. Usually, there are a few scripts obviously always going around with stories that happen in one location. — Jaume Collet-Serra

how many ghosts I was going to encounter. That Serra guy had to have a bunch of Native Americans mad at him - particularly considering that corporal punishment thing - and I hadn't any doubt I was going to encounter all of them. And yet, when my mom and I walked through the school's wide front archway into the courtyard around which the Mission had been constructed, I didn't see a single person who looked as if he or she didn't belong there. There were a few tourists snapping pictures of the impressive fountain, a gardener working diligently at the base of a palm tree - even at my new school there were palm trees - a priest walking in silent contemplation down the airy breezeway. It was a beautiful, restful place - especially for a building that was so old and had to have seen so much death. I couldn't understand it. Where were all the ghosts? Maybe they were afraid to hang around the place. I was a little afraid, looking up at that crucifix. — Meg Cabot

When you make a thriller/horror, darkness is [your] friend, because it lets the imagination go wild and what not. So you always end up going into darkness. — Jaume Collet-Serra

I could tell you, but you should never trust what someone says about themselves. It's something you need to see for yourself. — Maria La Serra

I will shoot on film as long as they make it. — Jaume Collet-Serra

Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before. — Richard Serra

Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me. — Charlie Rose

Thank God I arrived the day before yesterday, the first of the month, at this port of San Diego, truly a fine one, and not without reason called famous. — Junipero Serra

I wanted to move away from the disaster airplane movies that we have seen in the past and do something that was more mysterious, and delay until the end the resolution of the mystery, and then have to deal with the plane itself. — Jaume Collet-Serra

These days in movies you can always come back to a location or do an insert or do something, so that's not even an issue any more. But coming back every day to the same plane, it messes with your head. — Jaume Collet-Serra

He looked at me the way you'd look at a poodle that suddenly started reciting Hamlet. — Serra Elinsen

Now when you have administrators deciding what sexuality is, and what's a taboo and what's not in terms of content, you got guys, like, Trent Lott who equates homosexuality with a disease. — Richard Serra

The tract through which we passed is generally very good land, with plenty of water; and there, as well as here, the country is neither rocky nor overrun with brush-wood. — Junipero Serra

Even here, the soldiers speak of the hunt for the Empire's greatest traitor. And they speak of the girl you travel with: Laia of Serra. And - and the Artist . . . sometimes in his nightmares, he speaks too." "What does he say?" "Her name," Tas whispers. "Laia. He cries out her name - and he tells her to run. — Sabaa Tahir

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be. — Richard Serra

Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight. — Richard Serra

Dear girl with the red scarf,
People will come and go in our lives. Most of them we won't give a second thought to as soon as the door closes behind them. But I had always imagined that you would leave the deepest, everlasting mark.
-Mr. Universe. — Maria La Serra

You have to think of each stage of the movie and how it progresses, get into the state of mind of the character, and then match the camera to that, and keep making it tighter and tighter and crazier and crazier so people don't get bored. You know you cannot do a similar shot that you did at the beginning of the movie at the end. — Jaume Collet-Serra

I moved to Hollywood when I was 18. I never saw it as a disadvantage in any way. Quite the opposite. — Jaume Collet-Serra

I think different people have different problems and different relations to the exhibition of their work. — Richard Serra

Serra was a mix of light and darkness; he was a man of great vision and great blindness, of immense zeal and immense stubbornness. In his own mind, his goals justified his treatment of the Indians, whom he loved as the children he did not have and whom he disciplined with the same ardor with which he disciplined himself. His vision, like that of many of his eighteenth century contemporaries, demanded intolerance against those with different ideas about this world and the next. These qualities do not make him an angel or a devil; they simply make him a man of his time and place. His time and place were, like ours, far from perfect."26 — Christian Clifford

The thing about rigging is, you can learn it if you become a master rigger but there's no book on rigging. — Richard Serra

Anamorphic doesn't really lend itself to the big shots. — Jaume Collet-Serra

If you do any thriller or horror movie a big part of the process is accounting for the cell phone. — Jaume Collet-Serra

We found on our journey, as well as in the place where we stopped, that they treated us with as much confidence and good-will as if they had known us all their lives. — Junipero Serra

The people got daily worse from the cold and the bad water, and they must all have perished if they had not discovered the port about the time they did. — Junipero Serra

Obviously in the close-ups we bring extras around or we do it later, but them running in and the big shots, they don't know. They're just coming out. — Jaume Collet-Serra

It could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings - through photographs ... I'm interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides. — Richard Serra

If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day. — Richard Serra

Basically, what you really want to do is try to engage the viewer's body relation to his thinking and walking and looking, without being overly heavy-handed about it. — Richard Serra

It's hard to do a camera inside of a car. Non-Stop would have been impossible. Usually modern lenses you can focus up to the lens pretty much, but anamorphic you can't. You need like three feet. — Jaume Collet-Serra

as "a general endorsement of the exploitative colonization tactics of the Spanish. Though Junipero Serra was known to have argued on behalf of the property rights and economic entitlement of converted Native Americans, he consistently advocated against their right to self-governance, and was a staunch supporter of corporal punishment, appealing to the Spanish government for the right to flog Indians." When Doc had finished this particular lecture, I just looked at him and went, "Photographic memory much?" He looked embarrassed. "Well," he said. "It's good to know the history of the place where you're living." I filed this away for future reference. Doc might be just the person I needed if Jesse showed up again. Now, standing in the cool office of the ancient building Junipero Serra had constructed for the betterment of the natives in the area, I wondered — Meg Cabot

I could only shoot when the subway was on the other platform. Little things like that, and the platform is very narrow. It's not like you can hide if a subway comes so a lot of things happened because of that. Or a thousand people just came and looked straight into the lens like they didn't expect a movie to be shooting. — Jaume Collet-Serra

We have seen Indians in immense numbers, and all those on this coast of the Pacific contrive to make a good subsistence on various seeds, and by fishing. — Junipero Serra

You know how hard it is to swim take after take and perform the next day swimming again? Me, I'm a terrible swimmer, but most actors with that tight schedule would be sick pretty quick. — Jaume Collet-Serra

Time and movement became really crucial to how I deal with what I deal with, not only sight and boundary but how one walks through a piece and what one feels and registers in terms of one's own body in relation to another body. — Richard Serra

I pray God may preserve your health and life many years. — Junipero Serra

As, however, the port in reality lies in thirty-two degrees thirty-four minutes, according to the observations that have been made, they went much beyond it, thus making the voyage much longer than was necessary. — Junipero Serra

To see is to think, and to think is to see. — Richard Serra

I used to eat lunch with Billy Wilder when I first came out here. — Richard Serra

Now that everyone's shooting digital they want the anamorphic to soften the look. You know, to make it more filmic. — Jaume Collet-Serra

When I moved into making sculpture, I could handle steel the way it had been handled in the technological revolution. I could use it the way bridge builders used it; I could use it the way they used it in industry and building and not the way it had been used in art. — Richard Serra

I think you always have to find where the boundary is in relation to the context in order to be able to kind of articulate how you want the space to interact with the viewer. — Richard Serra

I thought Out of Action was better as a catalogue than the honeycomb because the honeycomb was like walking into one compartment and then another compartment. — Richard Serra

But I don't think of any particular viewer in mind other than myself. — Richard Serra