Quentin Tarantino Quotations

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

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

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.

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

I couldn't spell anything. I couldn't remember anything, but I could go to a movie and I knew who starred in it, who directed it, everything.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I've always thought my soundtracks do pretty good, because they're basically professional equivalents of a mix tape I'd make for you at home.

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.

Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

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

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

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

My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I'll be manager. Ill be the crazy old movie guy.

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 don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker. If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.

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

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

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.

Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.

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

Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.

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

I love Elmore Leonard. To me, True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.

I've always wanted to work with Warren Beatty.

It's very important that every movie I do makes money because I want the people that had the faith in me to get their money back.

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

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

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.

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.

I've always thought John Travolta is one of the greatest movie stars Hollywood has ever produced.

My mom took me to see Carnal Knowledge and The Wild Bunch and all these kind of movies when I was a kid.

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.

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.

I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.

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

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.

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

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

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

I don't think it's a stretch. I always knew Johnny was a good actor. But also, when you're looking for the ultimate, charming, redneck-scoundrel rascal, I think Johnny's the go-to guy.

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

I wasn't familiar with him, and I thought the scene was too brutal for the song. So what do I know?

The fact that England has embraced me as one of its own is really cool,

Ben Affleck, he looked like a little girl! When I saw Ben Affleck and Dave Spade acting like little girls, I said I got this one. I'm all good. I don't have to worry about nothing. ... That part that was in the wall, that was the bomb.

Ben Affleck, he looked like a little girl!,

Tell you what. Next time I do a movie, you can drive me to the set.

That part that was in the wall, that was the bomb. I wanted a lot of wall time and Wally gave me the wall time.

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.

I'm not, you know, Ronald McDonald opening up this Kmart or something. Rather than asking me for my autograph, you're actually watching a movie with me. If you want to sit there and talk about how to get into the business and ask me questions about 'Pulp Fiction' I'm not going to be very responsive. I'll probably shut you down. All right? But if you want to talk to me about the movie we just showed and what you thought about it, I'll talk to you all (expletive) night.

I'm not, you know, Ronald McDonald opening up this Kmart or something, ... Rather than asking me for my autograph, you're actually watching a movie with me. If you want to sit there and talk about how to get into the business and ask me questions about 'Pulp Fiction' I'm not going to be very responsive. I'll probably shut you down. All right? But if you want to talk to me about the movie we just showed and what you thought about it, I'll talk to you all (expletive) night.

If there is only one film you see this year, let this be it.

If there's another level of heaven, that's where I'm at,

I could do it, ... I've actually figured out a way, even though the characters have gotten older, to do it. I just have to have the ambition to write it.

To really get to know people and discover humanity, which is what I truly think writers and actors do, you've got to be interested in other human beings, you have to be interested in humanity in general, and you have to do some discovering of humanity and different people.

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

If you're trying to drop ten pages from a screenplay, it hurts like hell, but if you just put it away for a month and then take it out, you can do it just like that!

I won't even think about acting in a role where I didn't do a back story for a character.

It's my job to look at other people's humanity and it's my job to, 24/7, look at my life and listen to everything everyone says, watching their faces, the little idiosyncratic aspects of human beings - it's like a sponge, I take it in.

What the internet has done is destroy film criticism. I would never have guessed that the profession of film criticism would be going the way of the dodo bird.

I appreciate the female foot, but I've never said that I have a foot fetish. But I am a lower track guy. I like legs' I like booties'. I have a black male sexuality.

If you love cinema as much as I do, and not many people do, and if you are focused and actually have something to offer, you will get somewhere with it.

One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.

I like a much more Japanese style of blood, where it's red and it almost has a paint kind of quality to it. You can put it on metal, and it has this vividness. Because, normally, what they use in Hollywood is this stuff that looks like strawberry pancake syrup or raspberry pancake syrup.

I don't want to be an old-man filmmaker, making old-man movies, and I don't want to be the one not to know when to leave the party.

I've never used High Definition video, never, ever, ever, ever, ever. And I never will. I can't stand that crap.

I laugh all the time. I'm an easy laugher. You can find me on any set, because I'm always laughing.

I'm a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.

The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way.

I always wanted to do a movie that deals with America's horrific past with slavery, but the way I wanted to deal with it is - as opposed to doing it as a huge historical movie with a capital H - I thought it could be better if it was wrapped up in genre.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.

I'm very much a man of the moment. I can think about an idea for a year, two years, even four years all right, but what ever is going on with me the moment I write is gonna work it's way into the piece.

I'll write for a while and then I'll find an appropriate song and in a weird way the music will keep me in the mood. I find music to define the mood of the movie, the rhythm the movie is going to play in.

To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.

I see characters lying all the time in a lot of Hollywood movies. They can't do this because it would affect the movie this way or that or this demographic might not like it. To me a character can't do anything good or bad, they can only do something that's true or not.

One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

My writing's like a journey. I'll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I'll make some of those stops and some of them I won't. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you're going to do. It's all the scenes where your characters really come from.

I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

I don't have any one way to tell a story. I don't have any rule book of how it's supposed to be done. But I've always said that if a story would be more emotionally involving told, beginning, middle, and end, I'll tell it that way. I won't jigsaw it, just to show what a clever boy I am. I don't do anything in my script just to be clever.

When I'm writing in my bedroom, in a bar, at my kitchen table or wherever, I'm conjuring it all up on the page. That's all well and good, but it is going to be a limited perspective at that point and time. Occasionally, what I write might read really well initially, but then you change your mind while hunting for locations when you discover settings which offer even better opportunities for drama or dramatic staging.

Frankly, Django is an American story that needs to be told, when you think of slavery existing in this country for 245 years. In slave narratives there were all types of tales and drama and heroism and pain and love that happened during that time. That's rich material for drama! Everyone complains that there are no new stories left to tell. Not true, there are a whole bunch of them, and they're all American with a capital A.

If you were a U.S. Cavalry guy and you thought you were going to be captured by the Apaches, you might kill yourself. If they were with their wives and they thought they were going to be captured, they would shoot their wives for fear of the Apaches getting them.

American Indians would, you know, scalp them and desecrate the bodies, you know, tie them to cactuses or bury them in anthills or things like that, and you know, cut up the bodies and stuff. And then the other enemy soldiers would come across and find their comrades laying there, ripped apart, and they would be sickened by it and it would scare them.

They [American Indians] never did straight-up fights. It wasn't about, you know, getting killed in the line of fire. It was all ambush, ambush, ambush, and you ambush somebody, and then you take the scalps, and you - even though scalping wasn't created by the American Indians. It was created by the white man against Indians, and they just took it and claimed it.

Some of the inspirations I had as far as following that story would be, like, say, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," the way they use the Civil War in that, or even the idea that - the movie that Leone was going to do before he died was going to be a movie about the battle of Stalingrad.

I actually thought that the idea of doing a World War II movie in the guise of a spaghetti western would just be an interesting way to tackle it. Just even the way that the spaghetti westerns tackled the history of the Old West, I thought it could be a neat thing to do that with World War II, but just as opposed to using cowboy iconography, using World War II iconography as kind of the jumping-off point.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them. It's my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

I totally have no love for that whole romance for that Antebellum time period.