Julie Taymor quotes

I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form. (Julie Taymor)
I really do believe that if you don't challenge yourself and risk failing, that it's not interesting.
Julie Taymor
Limitations force you to find the essence of what you want to say, which is one of the most important things to know for an artist.
Julie Taymor
When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.
Julie Taymor
There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.
Julie Taymor
You know, I went to Oberlin. At that time, grades were - you elected to have them or not. It was all of that era where grades were out the window. But I did very well in school. I didn't really study the arts; I practiced the arts.
Julie Taymor
I'm not religious, but I believe in the ecstasy that art and religion can create in human beings, the ecstatic or the awe - as I like to call it, you know, "a-w-e" - that it makes people feel in a way that isn't their banal, everyday feel. That they go, "My God, it transformed me. My life changed."
Julie Taymor
There is something human beings can do. "The adrenaline rush," we call it. Fear, tremendous love. When people kill themselves, commit suicide over love, that kind of passion will move mountains.
Julie Taymor
To me, where theater has it all over film is that it's in the moment, it's tactile, you feel it ...You're completely immersed in it - right here and right now.
Julie Taymor
I would never do something with just puppets... But I like the things puppets allow you to do. I had this puppet Dinah Donewell, and she had this hand puppet named Mr. Pleaser. He was her lap dog who was constantly under her skirt. Now if you did that with actors, people would be offended. But in this case, so what? It was a puppet with a puppet.
Julie Taymor
When I was 14 or 13 or 15 I went to Sri Lanka on the Experiment in International Living for a summer. I wanted to travel. And going outside of my own culture and traveling and seeing my own world from a foreign perspective is a big part of my life and who I am. That's what I was talking about earlier, is stepping outside of yourself and examining yourself with a different perspective is very important, and it's important to do as an artist for others. (Julie Taymor)
I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.
Julie Taymor
You can do things that would bring people to another place and still get someone on a very daily mundane moving level but you don't have to separate art from the masses.
Julie Taymor
If you don't have fear then you are not taking a chance.
Julie Taymor
I'm trying to make the theatrical experience an environmental experience.
Julie Taymor
The concrete world isn't necessarily the most powerful world.
Julie Taymor
I don't think that anything that's really creative can be done without danger and risk.
Julie Taymor
Puppets really are the origin of theater. Even the shadow on the wall of Plato's cave was a puppet. The very first actor was some kind of hand creating some kind of animal.
Julie Taymor
The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist.
Julie Taymor
I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.
Julie Taymor
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. (Julie Taymor)
I use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way.
Julie Taymor
We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
Julie Taymor
I would never do something with just puppets. . . But I like the things puppets allow you to do.
Julie Taymor
I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation became the main word in my life.
Julie Taymor