Top 154 Quotes & Sayings by Eli Roth

Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.

I love movies. I mean, I really, really love movies.

The scariest people are usually the sweetest.

Las Vegas is a 24-hour city. It never stops.

I would love to do a musical!

Possession and exorcism is something that's in every religion and every culture. It's a real primal fear: Is the body a vessel for our spirits? What happens if something else takes over it? Where does the spirit go?

It's just assumed that a horror sequel is going to be bad. It's never going to be as good as the first one.

Once I got over the fear of writing female characters, it actually came quite easily and I was really happy with it. I just thought about girls I knew really, really well and I'd just have conversations with them and tried to relay how they talk about certain things.

Anytime you're the first to speak out against something, there's going to be a backlash.

I never put out a vanilla edition of a DVD.

What is important to me is that people know I respect the business of making movies.

I've always been fascinated by the idea that there's no such thing as evil; it's all in your point of view. To one group a suicide bomber is the antichrist and to one he's a hero.

I feel like in the '90s, horror just lost its way and everything became so safe and watered-down.

There's something very scary about exposing yourself on camera, knowing that you're going to be put on thousands of screens around the world for everyone to judge, but there's also something very thrilling and exciting about it.

I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.

When I go see an R-rated horror movie, I want lots of violence.

Well, anytime I make a movie, I like to load it up with more things than you could ever catch on the first viewing.

As a director, you have to know what actors are doing. You're the one telling them what to do. The actors' job is to come prepared to the set, but sometimes, if they're beginning actors or people who are non-actors, you have to teach them how to act.

'Beatrice Cenci' was an amazing film. If it were released today it'd win Best Picture. It's so well done, it's so contemporary, and the filmmaking is so smart.

I want people to see my name on a movie, pay money and know they're going to be entertained for 90 minutes.

People want to be disturbed when they go see a horror movie.

Much of my youth was spent in the parking lot or inside a Dunkin' Donuts.

I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.

There's fear in everything, but we can't just succumb to that. We have to suppress it, so we get used to suppressing fear to make it through the our day. Otherwise, we'd become paralyzed by them.

When people direct insults at me, I can take it.

Anytime you make a movie, the goal is a wide theatrical release, with the right distributor.

'Eraserhead' is a weird, horrible nightmare, and it doesn't narratively make sense. Stuff's happening, but you honestly feel like you're in a nightmare, and it has such disturbing imagery that it stays with you forever once you've seen it.

'Cabin Fever' was very much inspired by 'The Thing.' It's really a perfect guy's horror movie: There's no love story, it's just straight-up horror. And it's so well-done. It moves at a slow pace, but it's really terrific.

I'm not interested in going after a part. I think if someone wants me for a part and approaches me then I'll take it on a case-by-case basis and see what that part is.

When you make a film for a million and a half dollars and it opens at 20 million, the next question out of everyone's mouth is, 'When's the next one, when's the next one, when's the next one?'

Horror audiences don't need to see some TV actor they're familiar with.

I'd love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they'd get so violent that people would get bored of it.

I have so many different projects, I hear voices in my head - the characters talking all at once - and I have to write to make them stop.

I get a little too obsessive with work.

Movie stars need to retain some of that mystique if you are a big movie star.

As a kid, my idols were Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and I get into crazy races with myself. Raimi was 21 when he made movies, and when I didn't get 'Cabin Fever' made that fast I thought I'd failed.

I generally follow my own compass and make films about what's scaring me.

I love historical movies. I want to make a violent medieval epic.

I think characters are most terrifying when they're relatable. It's best when your most horrible characters make sense, and are believable. That's when a movie is most terrifying.

What's important for me is staying healthy.

I love movies that are just straight-up exploitation, but the ones that endure and the ones that last are the ones where the filmmakers put in that extra level of thought; after 25 years you put them on in front of an audience, and they'll respond to it and enjoy it.

You know, the dirty secret in the Director's Guild is that the average life expectancy of Director's Guild members is 57 years old. The stress level is so high and directors are generally really out of shape, cause they sit in the chair and they eat craft service.

Horror is like comedy. Woody Allen's comedy is going to be very different from Ben Stiller's comedy which is going to be different from Adam Sandler's comedy which is going to be different from Judd Apatow's comedy. They're all comedy, but they're all very different types and you can enjoy all of them. Horror is the same way.

Horror movies are the best date movies. There's no wondering, 'When do I put my arm around her?'

Chile could work as a double for L.A.; it's very production-friendly and there's terrific talent down there.

I've always dreamed of having a year-round haunted house.

I think that many people are ashamed when they feel afraid. There's this thing in our society that you're not allowed to feel scared. You have to be a man and put on a brave face, but we all have fears.

If you are having fun on the set, you are not getting things done.

I think that horror films have a very direct relationship to the time in which they're made. The films that really strike a film with the public are very often reflecting something that everyone, consciously or unconsciously feeling - atomic age, post 9-11, post Iraq war; it's hard to predict what people are going to be afraid of.

Some disaster movies look like you're watching someone else play video games. They're fun but it's not real.

You know, I'm from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand.

There's a crazy, false notion that audiences are not patient or will not watch a story, that you have to put in a scare every ten minutes. But I always thought that was insane.

I need to eliminate 'like' from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, 'That's seriously like... ' I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.

Everyone is so terrified of being labeled a racist.

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

The one negative to horror is that it's always law of diminishing returns. When you go in the funhouse, the ride is never scary the second time. You will never have that pure experience as when you first watch it.

I look at careers like Ben Stiller and think that's a great career to have where you're doing movies that you write and direct, and also act in films, although he's primarily an actor.

Look at comic books. It used to be something that only geeks were into. And now it's everywhere.

The best movies now are called 'thrillers.' Because if you use the word 'horror,' people's associations are straight-to-video crap.