I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that life experiences are like photographs waiting to be processed and understood over time.
Christopher Isherwood's quote metaphorically compares a person to a camera, indicating that life is filled with moments and experiences that, while they may seem chaotic or unprocessed in the moment, will eventually be 'developed' into meaning and understanding as time passes. It highlights the importance of perspective and reflection in making sense of one’s experiences.
In practice
This quote can inspire artists to continually explore their perceptions of the world.
The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.
A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.
What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?
I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.
The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.
Film has to be reflecting the world that we live in, and that's all you want to be a part of. Actors inhabit the same planet as everyone else. It's a weird thing that happens when you're an actor because people hold you up because you somehow embody in parts groups of people or people's hopes or something.
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.
We're told that independent film lovers... folks that are used to watching art house films, won't come out and see a film with black people in it - I've been told that in rooms, big rooms, studio rooms, and I know that's not true.
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