Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.

— Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa Quotes

The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self- sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life.

— Akira Kurosawa

I have no idea who the characters are, later, their personalities take over anything I might want to do. I end up writing not from my own will, but from theirs-they come alive as I write and make me do things that I couldn’t have planned.

— Akira Kurosawa

Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.

— Akira Kurosawa

This is probably true of human life everywhere – a light exterior hides a dark underside.

— Akira Kurosawa

Ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal.

— Akira Kurosawa

But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.

— Akira Kurosawa

Of course, compared to these two illustrious masters, Renoir and Ford, I am no more than a little chick.

— Akira Kurosawa

It seems I come from a line that is overly emotional and deficient in reason. People have often praised us as sensitive and generous, but we appear to me to have a measure of sentimentality and absurdity in our blood.

— Akira Kurosawa

In other words, take “myself,” subtract “movies” and the result is “zero.

— Akira Kurosawa

I had been ready to reproach her for the indignities she had caused me to suffer in the past, but suddenly I was moved by this figure of an old woman I no longer recognized, and all I could do was stare vacantly down at her.

— Akira Kurosawa

People who can’t make the simple distinction between what tastes good or bad have disqualified themselves from the human race,” was one of his pet theories.

— Akira Kurosawa

Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.

— Akira Kurosawa

It’s a mistake to decree that a year’s progress must take place within exactly one year, no more and no less.

— Akira Kurosawa

As I remember it, the fog-like substance that clouded my brain finally vanished as if blown away by the wind.

— Akira Kurosawa

You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them.

— Akira Kurosawa

There are sometimes such human beings among film critics – the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can’t have such people among film directors.

— Akira Kurosawa

They lived their lives as if their sights were set on the clouds beyond the hill they were climbing.

— Akira Kurosawa

Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.

— Akira Kurosawa

But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised.

— Akira Kurosawa

This little story has its charm and doesn’t really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior.

— Akira Kurosawa
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