Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Either you care, or you don't. There's no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.
The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.
No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.
I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.
God has a hard-on for a Marine because we kill everything we see. He plays His game, we play ours.
I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.
[Making movies] you're not trying to capture reality, you're trying to capture a photograph of reality.
Critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion.
The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.
If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
Regret isn't going to get me anywhere. It's like being obsessed with something. It doesn't bring you anywhere.
It's impossible to tell you what I'm going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.
Everything has already been done. every story has been told every scene has been shot. it’s our job to do it one better.
You're constantly changing man. But the film's not changing. The film stays the same. That's the beautiful aspect of it.
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.
I've never laid a cane on the back of a lord before, but if you force me to I shall speedily become used to the practice.
I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.
When you're making a film, you have to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip.
Know what it is the emotional statement to convey, and use taste and judgement to help the actors give their best possible performance.
Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.
I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, Mr. President, but I do say not more than ten to twenty million dead depending upon the breaks.
Be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power. Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.
I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.
The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.
Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.
It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.
I used and abused drugs and alcohol. When I stopped doing that it became a lot clearer that life goes from inside to giving as opposed to taking and destroying.
Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good and it trains you to think objectively when you're in trouble
There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.
A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be.
Suppose by chance you do get picked up. What have you done? You shot a horse; that isn't first degree murder; in fact, it isn't even murder; in fact, I don't know what it is.
Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
My period as a young teenager when you really listen to music so you can get understand a little bit more about what the music is was, say, 1965 to 1968. I was just lucky to be in those times.
The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.
I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.
The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.
I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don't like the book after a bit, I don't finish it. But I like to be surprised.
The director's job is to know what emotional statement he wants a character to convey in his scene or his line, and to exercise taste and judgment in helping the actor give his best possible performance.
The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.
The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, '2001' shows that what some people call 'god' is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call 'god' -Stanley Kubrick, interview, 1963
You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity--no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.
The hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that's going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie.
You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They're admired and hero-worshipped but there is always present underlying desire to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.
The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing and to think just as objectively when you're in trouble.
I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.
Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
Busy people begrudge the days being short. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.