Top 275 Quotes & Sayings by Guillermo del Toro

In the case of 'Shape Of Water,' I want it to feel like a song. I wanted people to come out of the movie humming the movie.

There is a heavy Mexican Catholic streak in my movies, and a huge Mexican sense of melodrama. Everything is overwrought, and there's a sense of acceptance of the fantastic in my films, which is innately Mexican. So when people ask, 'How can you define the Mexican-ness of your films?' I go, 'How can I not?' It's all I am.

I think love is the greatest force in the universe. It's shapeless like water. It only takes the shape of things it becomes.

The way I love monsters is a Mexican way of loving monsters, which is that I am not judgmental. The Anglo way of seeing things is that monsters are exceptional and bad, and people are good. But in my movies, creatures are taken for granted.

I wrote a screenplay for 'The Witches,' which Alfonso Cuaron was producing, but we couldn't get it made! The studio just wouldn't greenlight that movie. It's my favorite Roald Dahl book, 'The Witches,' because I grew up with my grandmother a lot of the time, and the relationship between the boy and the grandmother speaks volumes to me.

For me, real life is hard work. Making movies is like a vacation for my soul.

When you start with Super 8, you are everything. You're the DP, the sound man, the effects guy. And what I started understanding, by working for other people, is that the best type of director is someone who rose through the ranks.

To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.

I believe that we, every day, 24-7, all the days of our lives, we are, all of us, agents of construction and agents of destruction.

Everything I do, I do it with the hope that people will watch it more than twice. Whether it's 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Pacific Rim' or the opening of 'The Simpsons,' I do it with that hope.

There are two levels of vampirism: one is the regular vampire, which is just like it has always been; and then there's the super vampires, which are a new breed we've created.

In Mexico, you're close to death all the time.

I think the greatest giant insect movie ever made is 'Them!'

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.

I don't try to sanction other people's joy in monsters. I mean, I think the fact is, humor, fantasy - you know, like fear, desire or laughter - create genres of their own: comedy, melodrama, or erotic films or horror films... The boundaries cannot be defined. It's to each his own.

The problem with 'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark' was that it was designed to be a PG-13 movie. It was literally a horror movie for a younger generation. I was trying to do the film equivalent of teenage, young adult readers, and when they gave it an R rating, the movie couldn't sustain an R.

I'm a lapsed altar boy.

To me, the thing love and cinema have in common is that they are about seeing. The greatest act of love you can give to anyone is to see them exactly as they are. That's the greatest act of love because you wash away imperfections.

I love what many of my contemporaries are doing, especially people like Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, P. T. Anderson, and Alfonso Cuaron.

I'm not that interested in recreating reality. I'm interested in recreating an emotional truth.

I was a kid when I read Jane Eyre and fell in love with that universe. I didn't have the acumen to say the prose is old or the prose is too complex. I just fell in love with Jane's very lonely soul, much the same way I fell in love with Frankenstein's creature for the same reason. Those old souls exist in every decade in every century.

I think that most of the monsters I dream of, I dreamt of as a child.

To me, movies are books. They are texts to be consulted.

I think when we wake up in the morning, we can choose between fear and love. Every morning. And every morning, if you choose one, that doesn't define you until the end... The way you end your story is important. It's important that we choose love over fear, because love is the answer.

Insects are living metaphors for me. They are so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless; they don't have any human or mammalian instincts. They'll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There's no empathy - none.

There is beauty and humility in imperfection.

I'd love to come back as the most annoying ghost ever.

I'm a huge David Fincher fan, and to me, 'Zodiac' is a masterpiece. I re-watch that movie all the time.

I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.

The movie has to have some essence where you connect with it. The reason I'm doing 'Blade 2' and not 'Alien 4' is because I connect with the universe of 'Blade.' I don't connect with the universe of 'Alien.' Besides, I already did 'Alien 4': It's called 'Mimic.'

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

When I was a child, I was raised Catholic. Somewhere, I didn't fit with the saints and holy men. I discovered the monsters - in Boris Karloff, I saw a beautiful, innocent creature in a state of grace, sacrificed by sins he did not commit.

If you give an actor a green screen, the shot may work, but that green screen will not inspire you on the set as a director or as an actor.

But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.

I saw a martyr in the Wolf Man, who is the very moving essence of outsiderness, with which I identified fully.

I think that evil is a spiritual engine in our world, our lives, our universe, that functions in order to create good.

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.

I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen.

Any actor I admire and enjoy working with - Sergi Lopez as the bad guy in 'Pan's Labyrinth,' or the little girl who played young Mako in 'Pacific Rim,' it makes no difference - I like actors with a very strong centre.

The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else - whether they're gay, Mexican, Jewish, black - and saying, 'They are different than you. They're the reason you're in the shape you're in. You're not responsible.' And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.

I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don't see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with the rest of cinema.

'Hellboy 1' was such a huge, huge overperformer on Blu-ray and ancillary markets. It was one of the first movies on Blu-ray; it has multiple editions. All the ancillary markets overperformed everywhere. And the second one did good on all ancillary markets, which now do not exist.

I would have killed to do 'Beauty And The Beast' at Warners, which went away. I would have killed to do 'The Witches' at Warners that went away. God knows there are many, many of them. All I can do is diligently do the screenplay, diligently do the design work, deliver a budget, and then await a decision.

There is art and beauty and power in the primal images of fantasy.

When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was... an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.

There's nothing more political than fantasy.

I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget.

I had nightmares as a kid. As an adult, I have very prosaic dreams.

A lot of Mexican Catholic dogma, the way it's taught, it's about existing in a state of grace, which I found impossible to reconcile with the much darker view of the world and myself, even as a child.

Making a film is like raising a child. You cannot raise a child to be liked by everyone. You raise a child to excel, and you teach the child to be true to his own nature. There will be people who'll dislike your child because he or she is who they are, and there will be people who'll love your child immensely for the very same reason.

When I did 'Mimic,' it was such a difficult experience to try to make. Believe it or not, I did try to make a really adult giant bug movie. And then, in the course of the process, it kind of died a horrible death and gave birth to the movie that exists now, which now, in retrospect, I like. But it's not the movie I set out to do.

Monsters are evangelical creatures for me.

You cannot convince a Buddhist to become a Protestant any more than you can convince a person who embraces realism as the highest form of art that fantasy is an equally important manifestation. It's impossible.

I have a schizophrenic career. I have 'Cronos' and 'The Devil's Backbone' on one hand, and then I have 'Blade 2' and 'Mimic' on the other.

It's only in modern times that we have come to glorify vampirism.

Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.

I love monsters the way people worship holy images. To me, they really connect in a very fundamental way to my identity.

Love is love. And it's much better than hatred and fear.

More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.

I don't think there is life beyond death. I don't. But I do believe that we get this clarity in the last minute of our life. The titles we achieved, the honors we managed, they all vanish. You are left alone with you and your deeds and the things you didn't do.