My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incu… - Andrei Tarkovsky

"One woman sent me on a letter written to her by her daughter, and the young girl's words are a remarkable statement about artistic creation as an infinitely versatile and subtle form of communication:
'...How many words does a person know?' she asks her mother. 'How many does he use in his everyday vocabulary? One hundred, two, three? We wrap our feelings up in words, try to express in words sorrow and joy and any sort of emotion, the very things that can't in fact be expressed. Romeo uttered beautiful words to Juliet, vivid, expressive words, but they surely didn't say even half of what made his heart feel as if it was ready to jump out of his chest, and stopped him breathing, and made Juliet forget everything except her love?
There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. Will, feeling, emotion — these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door.. The frames of the screen move out, and the world which used to be partitioned off comes into us, becomes something real... And this doesn't happen through little Audrey, it's Tarkovsky himself addressing the audience directly, as they sit on the other side of the screen. There's no death, there is immortality. Time is one and undivided, as it says in one of the poems. "At the table are great-grandfathers and grandchildren.." Actually Mum, I've taken the film entirely from an emotional angle, but I'm sure there could be a different way of looking at it. What about you? Do write and tell me please.."

There was a time when I thought that film, unlike other art forms (being the most democratic of them all) had a total effect, identical of every audience. That it was first and foremost a series of recorded images; that the images are photographic and unequivocal. That being so, because it appears unambiguous, it is going to be perceived in one and the same way by everyone who sees it. (Up to a certain point, obviously)
But I was wrong. One has to work out a principle which allows for film to affect people individually. The 'total' image must become something private. (comparable with the images of literature, painting, poetry, music.)
The basic principle- as it were, the mainspring- is, I think, that as little as possible has actually to be shown, and form that little the audience has to build up an idea of the rest, of the whole. In my view that has to be the basis for constructing the cinematographic image. And if one looks at it from the point of view of symbols, then the symbol in cinema is a symbol of nature, of reality. Off course, it isn't a question of details, but of what is hidden.

The man who has stolen in order never to thieve again remains a thief. Nobody who has ever betrayed his principles can have a pure relationship with life. Therefore when a film-maker says he will produce a pot-boiler in order to give himself the strength and the means to make the film of his dreams — that is so much deception, or worse, self-deception. He will never now make his film.