Quotes & Sayings About Visual Thinking

We're living in a world where everything moves very quickly. We've become a very visual society, so I think it's a very natural thing that people are captivated with the illustrations in a story. — Stan Lee

What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts. — Naum Gabo

Music and visual performance have to influence each other. Designers and musicians have to be the nexus of all things pop culture, so I think about designers when I'm making music. — Lady Gaga

The use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent higher categories like lemon or umbrella? — David Papineau

We live in a society where we basically live and strive on what people think about us. We're more visual people so what we see is basically what we believe which is not necessarily true. — Mike Tyson

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary. — Jerry Saltz

I do have strong convictions and political opinions, but I don't think it's necessary to imbue my photographic work with them. I use photography as a vessel for visual material to flow through, to encourage conversation with the viewer. I try to present a catalyst and invite viewers to tell their own stories. — Michael Kenna

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us. — Tracy K. Smith

I studied neuroscience at the cellular level, so I was looking at learning and memory in the visual cortex of rats. Neuroscience mainly exposed me to a way of thinking - about experimentation, about what you believe to be true and how you could prove it - and how to approach things in a methodical manner. — Ze Frank

I think the benefit of a Catholic childhood is your belief in visual symbols as transmitters of information and clues about life, whether it's the mystery of life or life in general. — Robert Gober

With all of the visual distraction constantly inundating us in the form of our devices and screens, I really derive a great deal of pleasure from watching the sun rise and set, admiring clouds as they change shape across the sky, watching tree leaves and blossoms undulate in the breeze ... these treats foment an ocular-cleansing refreshment to my way of thinking. — Nick Offerman

When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting. — Adolph Gottlieb

I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind. — Neal Stephenson

I really like the interplay between thinking of text as ephemeral and thinking of it as a concrete, physical thing. With almost anything that I write, I'll stay completely immersed in the electronic text of it for a period of time and in another period, I'll stay immersed in it as a physical thing that can cut your skin. So with the apocalypses, I had them taped all over the wall and they had codes on them. Sometimes I would color code them in terms of thematic elements, sometimes in terms of voice, sometimes visual forms or images. — Lucy Corin

Once we actually have the production script after many rewrites, at that point is when I start to decide what the look and colors will be. I work like a painter, even though I'm working in three dimensions. I'm working with chairs. I'm working with walls. But even things like the floor or the walls that people might think are not important, they actually do influence the visual look of the film. These are also things that I have to think about. — Pedro Almodovar

Some visual artworks are made to be talked about more than to be seen, others are made to be seen more than to be talked about. I think I belong in the latter category. — Mati Klarwein

I enjoy the drawing more than the writing, so I try to think of ideas that will allow me to develop the visual side of the strip as fully as possible. — Bill Watterson

The best thing you can do for a song is to hear it on the radio and to imagine what it could mean to you and then kinda forget the words. Just imagine how you felt when you heard it, if it was one of your songs. If it became one of your songs. If it meant whatever it meant for you and as soon as you see the visual, you get a rapid eye movement relationship with the song instead of an imaginative one. I think that can be dangerous because I don't think I'd want to be listening to a song on the radio and thinking about the video. Whatever that one interpretation was — Ric Ocasek

My bottom line is that I think Ridley Scott is one of the greatest visual artists of our time and I feel very privileged that he wants to work with me, so I go with that flow. — Russell Crowe

And this movie [Real Steel] definitely looks like nothing else I've made, which was the point. I think also, Evangeline and Hugh are such a fantastic ... Their chemistry is so genuine. And also it's a good balance to all those visual effects. It'll give you more of the tone. — Shawn Anthony Levy

Sometimes the most interesting visual phenomena occur when you least expect it. Other times, you think youre getting something amazing and the photographs turn out to be boring and predictable. So I think thats why, a long time ago, I consciously tried to let go of artists angst, and instead just hope for the best and enjoy it. I love the journey as much as the destination. If I wasnt a photographer, Id still be a traveler. — Michael Kenna

I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail. — Michael Kenna

On some kind of unspoken, deep, deep level, I think we [with Ryan Murphy] have an aesthetic that we both understand or connect to. It's not that we see the world in the same way because we have very different points of view, but we're both visual stylists. — Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

I am charmed by concrete poetry (but it's very hard to do well, I think) and in general by the idea of mixing the visual and the textual. — Matthea Harvey

I think that there's a strong crossover in that Janis, studying the visual arts, was learning how to break it down into details and see how to get the expression that we wanted. And her visual art is emotionally expressive as her singing was. And, I think, when she switched over to singing, she already knew that it was something serious that you broke into pieces so she developed the ability to break it down and learn little riffs that she could throw in here and there. — Laura Joplin

I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me. — Lebbeus Woods

Acting is primarily is where I want to go. But seeing how the visual effects guys work, and the special effects guys and the art department guys, how they work and seeing their visions is really interesting. I don't think those guys get the recognition they deserve. — James Phelps

A bottle that reads, "Drink me." A tea party, with a dormouse, a March Hare, and of course, one Mad Hatter. A red queen, with as much a fondness for tarts as for saying, "Off with their heads!" When we think of Alice and her adventures in wonderland, we often think of these amazing (and amusing) elements. Although today, your vision of Alice in Wonderland probably includes Johnny Depp and a certain visual aesthetic by Tim Burton, it's difficult not to think of the Alice stories without thinking about the food that appears within the pages of the story. — Lewis Carroll

The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking. — James Hillman

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual. — Edward Tufte

At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways. — Laurie Anderson

The way something looks or sounds is also what it means. Words as visual and aural phenomena, which mainly poets, not critics and prose writers, tend to be obsessed with. I think maybe I'm more of a curator than I am a writer in the strict sense because I am interested in how everything on the page, in a space, works together. — Masha Tupitsyn

I think Catholicism took root very quickly in Ireland because it's a very superstitious religion, the holy ghost, the holy spirit, it has a goddess, very visual, the music. — Conor McPherson

I think that a visual artist's philosophy develops much more freely than a writer's or a thinker's philosophy. It is not so disciplined. The photographer works with both his eyes and his mind. — Manuel Alvarez Bravo

I hope my visual language inspires others to tell their stories and challenges people's thinking. — Aurora Guerrero

I think I've said this before many times - that photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you had never paid any attention to. And as you photograph, one of the benefits is that the world becomes a much richer, juicier, visual place. Sometimes it is almost unbearable - it is too interesting. And it isn't always just the photos you take that matters. It is looking at the world and seeing things that you never photograph that could be photographs if you had the energy to keep taking pictures every second of your life. — Saul Leiter

I think the artwork is very important because it gives people a visualization of my music. I wanted to create a whole visual aspect, so that the people listening to me can get a better understanding of my universe and integrate it fully into their own worlds. — Shook

Television has accustomed us to brief, intimate, telegraphic, visual, narrative messages. Candidates are learning to act, speak, and think in television's terms. In the process they are transforming speeches, debates, and their appearances in news into ads. — Kathleen Hall Jamieson

I was thinking about sort of the similarities between "art movies" and lowbrow movies like kitschy sexploitation films. I think they share certain qualities, whether they're hyper-stylized or overly emotive or just very visual. — John Waters

I think that being a film composer, someone that gets it and actually applies the music, it allows you to open up a spectrum of feeling. You're now allowed to approach the music from an audio visual perspective. — Adrian Younge

Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception. The only way I know how to invite this experience is by removing the other things (i.e., subject matter) for you to think about. — Uta Barth

It takes me a long time to change. I don't think you can just go out and figure out a bunch of visual ideas and photograph. The change happens in living and not through thinking. — Harry Callahan

Me being able to be acting and doing other things has opened me as an artist, and I think even more from a visual standpoint. — Common

Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless. — Siri Hustvedt

Sometimes you're writing a song and you have an image whilst writing a song. I don't think you ever base a songwriting process around a video, but when you're writing a song sometimes it'll be a very visual song. — Luke Hemmings

From a creative standpoint, I'm interested not only in the idea of helping couples and women, but challenging myself creatively, and doing each one better than the last thing I did. I think by doing that, by adding a visual element to these films, it really makes a huge difference. — Sasha Grey

I expected the unexpected and went [on the Moon] with an open mind. I think the visual scene was described by my words on first landing - "magnificent desolation." Magnificent for the achievement of being there, and desolate for the eons of lifelessness. — Buzz Aldrin

Now if you think about the 20th century and the idea of visual vocabulary the album occupies a really important space in the cultural landscape and, above all. — DJ Spooky

Matty," Jane whispered, "what are you thinking?"
He smiled, kissed her navel before glancing up at her. "Barbaric thoughts."
"You're very pleased with yourself, aren't you?"
He laughed and slid up the length of her body. "I am. It's such a powerful
visual to know that my seed is responsible for the life within you and the
incredibly arousing changes in your body.
"And, I, of course, have nothing to do with it?"
"Jane," he whispered, "let me have my moment of male glory. — Charlotte Featherstone

The grey is certainly inspired by the photo-paintings, and, of course, it's related to the fact that I think grey is an important colour - the ideal colour for indifference, fence-sitting, keeping quiet, despair. In other words, for states of being and situations that affect one, and for which one would like to find a visual expression. — Gerhard Richter

I don't like seeing myself on television and I don't enjoy filming. What I actually enjoy is thinking about how I am going to express something or how we are going to make the visual metaphor. — Robert Winston

I think you have to be very careful with effects that they don't overpower the story with the visual element. — Harrison Ford

I don't think comedians take advantage of the fact that television and film are visual mediums. — Eric Andre

I start by thinking I'm going to make use of all possibilities without troubling any longer about problems when something starts to be art. I don't make the ETERNAL work of ART, I only give visual information. — Jan Dibbets

I think the story should always determine the visual approach. There are situations where you want things to feel alive and like life, and there are situations that should have some magic and the separation with the grain. — Judd Apatow

I don't think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I'm always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking - although I want good talking. I'm much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth. — Alexander Payne

What was good was that I had friends who were actors and in theatre who were really good, because I think my strengths were visual, like pictorial. — Rob Urbinati

My paintings have an ongoing dialogue with photography. There are many painters who would say the same, I'm sure. The difference is that I'm thinking more about the temporal aspect of photography, rather than the visual. — James Nares

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them. — Neko Case

I think words speak to us even though they may be written on a wall. So we hear them in our mind. We say it to ourselves. But they are also visual things. You draw them. They are designed. They are colored. They have a certain size. I put them in a certain place. So they are objects that have to be - artistic decisions have to be made in terms of the color and the size and the line and whatever. — Robert Barry

I see everything visually. It's very visual for me. And so I think, from a plotting standpoint or what have you, there's obviously a certain amount of internal thinking that goes on in a novel (that) you can't do ... in a screenplay. But I think, pacing wise, my novels move quickly because (they aren't overly) descriptive. — Michael Landon Jr.

The best way way to get a visual image is not to think of a visual image. — Bob Gill

To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively. — E. O. Wilson

I don't think the written word is important in movies anymore and the really great movies are done by great directors who in many cases write their own scripts. I think it's gotten to be more of a visual thing than an audible thing. — Anita Loos

A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist - moving an audience through a movie ... making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark. — Gordon Willis

Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art ... He declared that he wanted to kill art ("for myself") but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object". — Jasper Johns

When I draw it feels very natural - intuitive. I don't think about it, I just do it. My visual vocabulary is self-selecting and second nature to me. Writing is harder for me. It's something I struggle with. Drawing always comes first. — Arthur Jones

I had seen "Force Majeure" and I just love that movie so much. And I really wanted to artistically give a little hello to the filmmakers, and that kind of back and forth dialogue between artists that say, "I loved your movie. I was influenced by your movie. If I didn't have this job, I wouldn't be thinking of that. Do my TV show and then one day I'll make a movie where I can play with some of the visual themes in "Force Majeure." — Jill Soloway

The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se. — Jeff VanderMeer

Design is thinking made visual. — Saul Bass

I think that if you're creating an environment completely or ... in my research, what I've learned is that if it's a CG world or a lot of visual effects, you're almost better doing that in post. — Neal H. Moritz

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first. — Neill Blomkamp

A certain type of critic doesn't really want French movies to be visual. They think movies started from books and they forgot this part of moviemaking, like Chaplin and Buster Keaton, which I didn't forget. — Audrey Tautou

I don't necessarily think there's a difference in terms of how the film industry and the ad industry view visual effects. If visual effects (or the lack thereof) are used as a tool to strengthen an idea, they're great. If they are meant to carry more of a load in the absence of a concept, they're a waste and a distraction. — Joshua Rogers

[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the "widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills." We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our "new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence" go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of "deep processing" that underpins "mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection. — Nicholas Carr

I think that it drives from an emotional connection with everybody that pulls you through all of those events, whether it's the events or what would be more the action, or I guess the visual effects side of it. So it always starts with me from - emotionally - 'Why do you care about the people who are going through what they're going through?' Because it takes a hell of a lot to put them through that. So you better care for them when they're doing it. — Len Wiseman

The visual side of being a performer or in a band is, to me, as important as the music. I know not everyone shares that same opinion, but when I'm writing songs or working on lyrics or coming up with an idea, I think about videos as I'm in the studio. If I had all the money in the world, I would have the most amazing videos ever, you know? You're saying grandiose, and big; if the song warrants it, I try to push the visuals as far as I can. — Tamaryn

I can't separate the process of writing from the visual process. I'm speaking only for myself here, but I'm a highly visual writer. In my imagination, when I'm thinking of a scene, I think of every last detail of it: The space, the color palette, the blocking of the actors, the placement of the camera. — Stephen Gaghan

Design is a form of competitive advantage. People tend to think of design as good art, good visual language, which it absolutely has to be. But it's also about the ability to do systems thinking. — James P Hackett

I really feel concerned about young people within our present culture. Our present culture, we have to change. Change is inevitable and I wasn't raised in our present culture but it has great pressure that as a young person I never had. Material pressure, social pressure, visual pressure, how you look, and I just try to appeal to young people to think for themselves, to be their own person, and to ask questions and also be very attentive to our planet and our environment. — Patti Smith

There are some superficial things that connect me to the stream. There's instrumentation, there's timbre, use of electronics, the way that samples are used, the way the electric guitar is used. I'm thinking of things that are particular to this era. But I don't always feel particularly close to the music of my peers. I often feel that I have more in common with writers and visual artists. I try to connect to people in an emotional kind of way. — Missy Mazzoli

I find music the the clearest and easiest way in to what a movie will feel like - more so than visual references or other movies or dense dossiers of research material. Every now and then I'll send a piece of music or two to people I'm working with - actors or heads of department - when I think it'll help them get a sense of the kind of movie I'm proposing. Often those pieces will end up in the movie - sometimes they won't. — David Michod

The film that really struck me was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. That was a film I watched many, many times and found endlessly fascinating in it's density. I think the density of that film is primarily visual density, atmospheric, sound density, moreso than narrative density. — Christopher Nolan

I really admire visual storytelling that shows you what's happening, instead of tells you what's happening. I think it really forces the filmmaking to be very clear. — John Kahrs

I think everyone on the planet is a fan of a painting because everyone is a fan of visual stimulation, but I've had freedom in the world [of painting] because I've kept it to myself. — Scott Avett

The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me. — Joyce Carol Oates

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me. — Craig Venter

In my day the library was a wonderful place ... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs ... it was a sanctuary ... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge. — Norman Mailer

The silliness-much of which is clearly intentional-is blended with some genuine grandeur. The Pixar touch is evident in the precision of the visual detail and in the wit and energy of Michael Giacchino's score, but the quality control that has been exercised over this project also has a curiously undermining effect. The movie eagerly sells itself as semitrashy, almost-campy fun, but it is so lavish and fussy that you can't help thinking that it wants to be taken seriously, and therefore you laugh at, rather than with, its mock sublimity. — A.O. Scott

If you're going to be a visual artist, then there has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That's why it's not like a table or a car or something. I think that that might even be hard for people because most of our visual experiences are of tables. It has no business being anything else but a table. But a painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not-you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question. — Richard Tuttle

I was tied down in that chair for 10 minutes and experienced what it was like to be completely powerless while someone else has complete dominance. It's sadistic, even though I find Richard to be a really lovely human being. That's what the whole film [Tickled] is about. It's not a film about tickling, but I think tickling offers a really good visual metaphor for the much bigger ideas that we were trying to get at about power and control - by people who have a lot of money - over people without money and who have no power in the relationship. — David Farrier

These days I think the composers of music influence me more than any photographers or visual creators. I see something exciting or lovely and think to myself: 'If Papa Haydn or Wolfgang Amadeus or the red-headed Vivaldi were here with a camera, they'd snap a picture of what's in front of me.' So I take the picture for them. — Ralph Steiner

Micromessaging
communicating with other human beings through visual, audible, sublingual means, no doubt predates our ability to speak. We actually read micromessages quite naturally without thinking about them. You might say human beings read each other's micromessages subconsciously, in the same way that one dog understands another dog is unfriendly simply because the dog's fur is standing on end. The dogs read each other perfectly. It's not all that different for people. — Stephen Young

I think the power of the short film is incredibly underrated. It is way easier to get someone to watch a 15-minute film then a full-length feature. In those 15 minutes you have the opportunity to express your voice as an artist and hopefully connect with your audience. If you are trying to be a first time feature director then a short film that demonstrates you have a grasp on the themes and concepts of the movie you want to direct is a no-brainer. Whether they are collaborators or potential investors, filmmaking is a visual art form so you obviously need visuals to show them! — Nicholas Ozeki

I think film is about images. Cinema needs good images. I think that if you don't have good images, it's not going to be a good film. I think all films should be really visual. — Vilmos Zsigmond

And also the idea of not making it apparent that it's different from the rest of the film, even though there are visual differences, the audience is supposed to think that they are with him when he wakes up in the morning. — Charlie Kaufman

I'm really inspired by the interplay of visual art and music, a total artistic environment where there's sound and visuals. When I think about that I get stimulated and excited. It's a feeling that you can't label with words. — Black Francis

I can't stop thinking about cutting myself up. Visual bruises can be covered with make-up, but down to the core, I'm all bruises. — Majandra Delfino

What appear to be the most valuable aspects of the theoretical physics we have are the mathematical descriptions which enable us to predict events. These equations are, we would argue, the only realities we can be certain of in physics; any other ways we have of thinking about the situation are visual aids or mnemonics which make it easier for beings with our sort of macroscopic experience to use and remember the equations. — Celia Green

I think it's very, very important that people outside the capital cities, not just Sydney and Melbourne but also Brisbane Perth Adelaide and so on, have the greatest access to the best cultural experiences they can in both the performing arts and the visual arts. — George Brandis