5 Quotes & Sayings By Donald Richie

Donald Richie is an internationally recognized authority on Japanese cinema, author, critic, essayist, and curator of film. He has written extensively on Japanese cinema since the 1950s, including more than thirty books. His works have been translated into nineteen languages. He is editor of The Films of Japan, an international publication on Japanese cinema with a circulation of more than 60,000 Read more

He is also the compiler of The Films of Yasujirō Ozu, the seminal work on the director’s work which was first published in 1967.

1
Japan never considers time together as time wasted. Rather, it is time invested. Donald Richie
2
Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular. Donald Richie
3
When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library. Donald Richie
4
What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing -- what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies. Donald Richie