Bill Viola
Bill Viola

Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

There's another world out there just beyond the world we're in. It's just on the other side of that translucent, semitransparent surface.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

I cry a lot. Usually once a day. I think it's one of the most profound forms of human expression.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity... but there's a feeling that life is interconnected, that there's life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

The world is fine and everything is normal and then, bang, you just get bowled over by the wrathful deities somehow. That happens in very small ways and happens in very large ways when you have a major conflagration in the world. It's another cycle of existence of human beings.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities. For me the essential basis of video is the movement - something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

I came of age at the end of the 1960s, just when video was also coming into the world. Companies such as Sony and Panasonic were starting to market it and we artists immediately knew how it could be used.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don't say 'insecure' in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: 'Are they good enough?' 'Is this the right thing to do?' I really beat myself up over that.

Bill Viola
Bill Viola

The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.