There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.

Tilda Swinton

Categorized in : Spiritual Artist Buddhist

I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

Tilda Swinton

distance believe art

I never quite understand the way society decides who is beautiful and who is not. But an open face and a capacity for kindness always feel like reliable signifiers to me.

Tilda Swinton

collaboration kindness beautiful

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

Tilda Swinton

soul art firsts

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

Tilda Swinton

aliens real comfort

Most of us live our whole lives without having an adventure to call our own.

Tilda Swinton

vision dream adventure

If we don't accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain't true.

Tilda Swinton

loneliness winning hands

Daily absorption in the physical actualities of nature is life as I need it to be: it means I am connected to such large things - sky, sea, hill, the vagaries of weather, the undeniable needs of animals - that I can disappear as a subject of interest, I can exist without self-consciousness. The city is a challenge for me, however thrilling a few days prove, for its insatiable overstimulation and the rarity of quiet. The city makes people bigger than they need to be.

Tilda Swinton

animal mean people

I'm interested in that whole question of where we wear our identity and how can we see it.

Tilda Swinton

whole identity

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

Tilda Swinton

identity expectations people

This self-obsession is a waste of living. It could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and dancing.

Tilda Swinton

self kindness meaningful

I'm really interested in the idea of long, long life and transformation and immortality.

Tilda Swinton

transformation long ideas

As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be.

Tilda Swinton

able appearance ideas

Do you want a list of what my dogs taught me? Patience, perspective, joy, loyalty, the simplicity and presence of their joy. That's a really great daily reminder, bad stuff happens, difficult stuff happens and you take them out onto the beach and you go "OK, now I see". You tell them the current political situation in the world and they go "should we go for a walk?" And you go, right, that's the correct answer.

Tilda Swinton

loyalty dog beach

You can sit next to somebody on the underground, and you can look at them quite intensely, but you can never, ever know what they're wearing under their clothes.

Tilda Swinton

clothes next looks

I would rather be handsome for an hour than pretty for a week.

Tilda Swinton

women feminist inspiring

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about.

Tilda Swinton

eye art thinking

When I'm in northern Italy, I walk about feeling slightly less of a freak.

Tilda Swinton

freak walks feelings

I'm from the same planet as David Bowie.

Tilda Swinton

bowie planets

It was just me, naked as underneath my clothes right now, as all of you are.

Tilda Swinton

naked clothes right-now

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

Tilda Swinton

example people thinking