Quentin Tarantino Quotations | Page 3

Critics don't want to see directors they like make too much of a left turn. That's good for criticism.

What if a kid goes to school after seeing Kill Bill and starts slicing up other kids? You know, I'll take that chance! Violent films don't turn children into violent people. They may turn them into violent filmmakers but that's another matter altogether.

I am not going to tell you how I believe, but I do believe in God.

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my fingers upon thee!

If you're a film fan, collecting video is sort of like marijuana. Laser discs, they're definitely cocaine. Film prints are heroin, all right? You're shooting smack when you start collecting film prints. So, I kinda got into it in a big way, and I've got a pretty nice collection I'm real proud of.

Sure, and that's the cool thing about DVD: you can pack stuff on the disc that would've been too much for the big screen because actually it would've only interested yourself and a bunch of fanboys, who wanna know everything.

If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something.

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides By the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, Shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger Those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

I remember, like, literally saying - watching some cowboy-and-Indian movie with my mother, and I go, so, if we were back then, we'd be the Indians, right? She goes, yup, that's who we'd be. We wouldn't be those guys in the covered wagons. We'd be the Indians.

You should be semi-embarrasse d about certain people seeing your movie.

A movie doesn't have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those things well and gives you a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that's good enough.

I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards - in the life of an artist.

And by banning [smartphones] from the set, the whole crew tends to work tighter with each other. And then it just becomes a thing where people kind of fall in love with the idea, 'This is the film-industry that I signed up for! This is really wonderful.' But then they go back to another set and everybody's on their cellphone, everyone's in their own little box, and they get depressed about it.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them.

Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He's weak... he's unsure of himself... he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.

Hamburgers! The corner-stone of any nutritious breakfast.

You know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It's the little differences.

A thing when I was writing the movie [The hateful eight] was, I hate The Confederate cause. I've always felt that they are our Nazis and the rebel flag was our swastika. So I totally have no love for that whole romance for that Antebellum time period.

Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.

I didnt go to film school, i went to films

I don't have to play the song all the way to the very end - I use it while it's good and while it's cool and while it's exciting, and then I get out.

I definitely have some colleagues that I respect, and we get together from time to time. But I actually have just like genuine friends. Paul Thomas Anderson is a genuine friend. Robert Rodriguez is a genuine friend. Rick [Richard] Linklater is a genuine friend. Eli Roth is a genuine friend. And so is Edgar Wright.

Violence is fun, man.

Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.

To me, torture would be watching sports on television.

When you start writing, you have your characters on a metaphorical paved road, and as they go down it, all these other roads become available that they can go down. And a lot of writers have roadblocks in front of those roads: they won't allow their characters to go down those roads. I've never put any roadblocks on any of these paths. My characters can go wherever they would naturally go, and I'll follow them.

I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.

Most, actually, German actors have like some speaking of French. So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency.

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

When it came to a lot of these German actors with the English, they just couldn't do it. They couldn't get the poetry out of it. They couldn't own it and make it their own. And they were struggling with it. And then, Christoph [Waltz] came in and I didn't know who Christoph was.

The good ideas will survive.

To me "King Kong" is a metaphor for America's fear of the black male and to me that's obvious. All right, so I mean that was one of the first things I said when I was talking to a friend of mine after he saw Peter Jackson's version of "King Kong."

In real life there are no bad guys. Everybody just has their own perspective.

I mean, there's an aspect I've always said that is - it's, you know, it's not poetry but it's kind of like it. It's not song lyrics but it's kind of like song lyrics. It's not rap but it's kind of like rap. And it's not stand-up comedy but it is kind of like stand-up comedy. It's all those things together.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, but when you try to deal with prescient themes in the present, that is what you're doing.

Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room... I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I'm looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with.

And there's wordplay and there's rhythms and you have to be able to get the poetry out of it. You have to be able to sell my jokes. And if you're talking about somebody like Sam Jackson, they do that. Sam Jackson can do that. Sam Jackson can turn it into the spoken word that it was always meant to be and he can sell my jokes. And Christopher Walken can do it and a lot of people can do it, all right.

To me, America is just another market.

Oh gosh, well, you know, growing up in the '70s being a young boy there, you know, there were still exploitation movies, where, you know, were, you know, still opened up every week and, you know, played - sometimes they would play it at the local, you know, mall theater.

I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you're not that good. You just reached the level here. I don't ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.

I mean, of course "King Kong" is a metaphor for the slave trade. I'm not saying the makers of "King Kong" meant it to be that way, but that's what, that's the movie that they made whether they meant to make it or not.

To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.

I don't want to deal with the underneath while I'm, you know, while I'm making it or when I'm writing it or when I'm making it, because again, I don't want to hit these nails on the head too strongly.

You get to be analytical about the process and now I can watch the movie and see all the different connection things and see all the things that are underneath the surface.

I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It's when a scene works emotionally and it's cool and clever, then it's great. That's what you want.

If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down.

Spaghetti Westerns are really brutal and operatic with a surreal quality to the violence.

That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.

If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions.

I always knew I wanted to do a Western. And trying to think of what that would be, I always figured that if I did a Western, it would have a lot of the aesthetics of Spaghetti Westerns, because I really like them.

If a Million People See My Movie, I Hope They See a Million Different Movies.

It hit me that an Apache resistance would be a wonderful -you know, it would be a wonderful metaphor for Jewish-American soldiers to be using behind enemy lines against the Nazis because the Apache Indians were able to fight off for decades both the Spaniards and the Mexicans and the U.S. Cavalry for years because of their - they were great guerrilla fighters. They were great resistance fighters. And one of their ways of winning battles was psychological battles.

You should be able to criticize civil servants for what you think is wrongdoing without being painted as a cop-hater. I don't feel the police are all corrupt, however I do feel they are suffering from institutional racism and there needs to be a top-to-bottom examination of the way they practice and the way they criminalize young black and brown males. The fact that they seem to have backed off from it seems to suggest they realize they overreacted on me and it looks bad.

You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.

You don't have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can't help but make a good movie.

The only other animals that would be in the ballpark to be able to do it would be a gorilla, but it's not going to occur to a gorilla to strangle the life out of somebody. They might rip their head off, all right, but it wouldn't occur to a gorilla to just, I'm going to cut off your air.

One can be inclined to just say, "F this political correctness! I don't have time for that!"

I steal from every movie ever made.

I surprised myself, that I was in the tissue of the character enough, that I could actually come up with something that I didn't actually feel or didn't believe.

You know, my problem with most screenwriting is it is a blueprint. It's like they're afraid to write the damn thing. And I'm a writer. That's what I do. I want it to be written. I want it to work on the page, first and foremost. So when I'm writing the script, I'm not thinking about the viewer watching the movie. I'm thinking about the reader reading the script.

The easiest way to kill a cult is to make that cult accessible.

I cut the scene out, but there was a moment where Christoph Waltz plays the piano in 'Django [Unchained]' - Jamie [Foxx] is a magnificent piano-player but there's never a moment where Django plays the piano.

By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.

There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

I remember when it was reported that I was going to do the film in this format, people were actually speculating, and I guess I understand it. They were like, "Yeah, okay, that all sounds really great, but why would he do it for a thing that's so set bound?" That's not very profound thinking when it comes to 65mm. It's not just for shooting travelogues, mountain scenery and nature.

You know, the art films would usually be more, I mean the exploitation movies would usually be more lurid, but not that much more. I mean, actually back in those days that was what foreign films had. They had sex, they were selling Laura Antonelli.

If you want to make a movie, make it. Don't wait for a grant, don't wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it.

I dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play.

I just don't feel the whole white guilt and pussy-footing around race issues. I'm completely above all that. I've never worried about what anyone might think of me 'cause I've always believed that the true of heart recognize the true of heart.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.