Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

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Andrei Tarkovsky was one of the greatest directors of recent years. He's dead, like most of them. That is, most of them are dead or have stopped making films. Or else, somewhere along the line, they've irretrievably lost something, some individual sort of imagination, intelligence or way of narrating a story. Tarkovsky was certainly one of those who hadn't lost this. Unfortunately, he died. Probably because he couldn’t live anymore. That's usually why people die. One can say it's cancer or a heart attack or that the person falls under a car, but really people usually die because they can’t go on living.

— Krzysztof Kieślowski

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On the set of Stalker; dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979

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Jedes unserer Rendezvous, nicht viele, feierten wir wie eine Epiphanie, allein auf der ganzen Welt.

— Arseny Tarkovsky

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This time of year.

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You cannot use somebody else's map to find yourself.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

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On the set of Mirror; dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1975

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On the set of Stalker; dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979

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