Top 128 Quotes & Sayings by Stanley Kubrick - Page 2

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.

Regret isn't going to get me anywhere. It's like being obsessed with something. It doesn't bring you anywhere.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.

You're constantly changing man. But the film's not changing. The film stays the same. That's the beautiful aspect of it.

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.

I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.

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.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.

The most terrifying fact about the universe not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent

I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.

The reality of the final moment, just before shooting [the scene], is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.

I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow, only of being killed.

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.

I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.

Take a stress pill and think things over-- HAL in 2001

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.

Everything has changed, but the process of telling a story has not changed. It's like cavemen sitting around the fire; somebody's going to tell the story. Somebody is drawing on the wall. You're communicating. You're trying to learn and teach at the same time. You're your own student and you're your own teacher, but the process is of the communicating.

[Making movies] you're not trying to capture reality, you're trying to capture a photograph of reality.

I haven't had one sexual thought since the court martial.

One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.

I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized 'realistic' story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its 'realist' style.

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.

From the very beginning, all of my films have divided the critics. Some have thought them wonderful, and others have found very little good to say. But subsequent critical opinion has always resulted in a very remarkable shift to the favorable. In one instance, the same critic who originally rapped the film has several years later put it on an all-time best list. But of course, 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.

When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination.

A film needs more than you can give it in a lifetime.

Everybody has their black moments.

It's a passion when you're doing it for other people and you're doing it for the people around you making the film and the people who are going to see the film, and the giving. When you start thinking about you doing it for some sort of self-gain, then I think it becomes an obsession. It becomes a negative experience.

Some people demand a five-line capsule summary. Something you'd read in a magazine. They want you to say, 'This is the story of the duality of man and the duplicity of governments.' I hear people try to do it -- give the five-line summary -- but if a film has any substance or subtlety, whatever you say is never complete, it's usually wrong, and it's necessarily simplistic: truth is too multifaceted to be contained in a five-line summary. If the work is good, what you say about it is usually irrelevant.

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.

Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.

One does not have to make Frank Capra movies to like people.

Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines things.

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.

How does anybody ever think of anything?

Anybody who runs is a VC. Anybody who stands still is a well-disciplined VC.

Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.

You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point.

All my life I've always spoiled the things that meant the most to me.

I'm just an old man and I smell bad, remember?

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.

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 either care or you don’t.

God has a hard-on for a Marine because we kill everything we see. He plays His game, we play ours.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

Critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion.

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.

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.

New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema.

If Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda had a baby, it would be Matthew Modine.

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.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem

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.

Don't do anything. Just tolerate me and let me suffer, knowing how you feel.

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.

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

Bad films gave me the courage to try making a movie

I'm happy - at times - making films. I'm certainly unhappy not making films.

The screen is a magic medium.

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.

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.