Top 293 Quotes & Sayings by Quentin Tarantino

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.

Reservoir Dogs is a small film, and part of its charm was that it was a small film. I'd probably make it for $3 million now so I'd have more breathing room.

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' is not really my thing, but I kind of loved it.

Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.

'Django' was definitely the beginning of my political side, and I think 'Hateful Eight' is the... logical extension and conclusion of that. I mean, when I say conclusion, I'm not saying I'll never be political again, but, I mean, I think it's like, in a weird way, 'Django' was the question, and 'Hateful Eight' is the answer.

The good ideas will survive.

My movies are painfully personal, but I'm never trying to let you know how personal they are. It's my job to make it be personal, and also to disguise that so only I or the people who know me know how personal it is. 'Kill Bill' is a very personal movie.

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

If you go out and see a lot of movies in a given year, it's really hard to come up with a top ten, because you saw a lot of stuff that you liked. A top 20 is easier. You probably get one masterpiece a year, and I don't think you should expect more than one masterpiece a year, except in a really great year.

L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.

I want to have the fun of doing anime and I love anime, but I can't do storyboards because I can't really draw and that's what they live and die on.

Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I'm not interested in, I can't even feign interest.

I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

Trying to make a feature film yourself with no money is the best film school you can do.

I got into Facebook late, and I think if you get into Facebook late, you tend to use it the right way, as opposed to the people who got into it sooner and friended everybody and now have a thousand friends. I keep it at about 80 or so, and they're all people I know. Just because I do a movie doesn't mean I friend everybody in it.

I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can't ever remember a time when I didn't.

It's a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody's arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.

Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

I don't really know if I'm writing the kind of roles that Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore would play. Jessica Lange on 'American Horror Story' is a little bit more my cup of tea.

I don't believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off. I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more.

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

When I make a film, I am hoping to reinvent the genre a little bit. I just do it my way. I make my own little Quentin versions of them... I consider myself a student of cinema. It's almost like I am going for my professorship in cinema, and the day I die is the day I graduate. It is a lifelong study.

I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.

Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.

I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.

I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.

In the '50s, audiences accepted a level of artifice that the audiences in 1966 would chuckle at. And the audiences of 1978 would chuckle at what the audience of 1966 said was okay, too. The trick is to try to be way ahead of that curve, so they're not chuckling at your movies 20 years down the line.

I cannot get myself interested in video games. I've been given video game players and they just sit there connected to my TVs gathering dust until eventually I unplug them so I can put in another special-region DVD player.

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.

I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.

CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the '70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They're really doing it and risking their lives. But I knew CGI was gonna start taking over.

Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first.

Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.

If I wasn't a film-maker, I'd be a film critic. It's the only thing I'd be qualified to do.

I actually want to do a theatrical adaptation of 'Hateful Eight' because I actually like the idea of other actors having a chance to play my characters and see what happens from that.

I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

My parents said, Oh, he's going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.

I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.

I think we spent 60-something million on 'Hateful Eight,' which is actually more than I wanted to spend, but we had weather problems. And I wanted to make it good.

I steal from every movie ever made.

If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.

I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away.

I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.

I have a lot of Chinese fans who buy my movies on the street and watch them, and I'm OK with it. I'm not OK with it in other places, but if the government's going to censor me, then I want the people to see it in any way they can.

All my movies are achingly personal.

I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.

I look at 'Death Proof' and realize I had too much time.

As a viewer, the minute I start getting confused, I check out of the movie. Emotionally, I'm severed.

I always do an all-night horror marathon on Saturdays where we start at seven and go until five in the morning.

I've always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

I'm not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'

A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

Australian genre films were a lot of fun because they were legitimate genre movies. They were real genre films, and they dealt, in a way like the Italians did, with the excess of genre, and that has been an influence on me.

I'm probably only going to make 10 movies, so I'm already planning on what I'm going to do after that. That's why I'm counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.

I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.