Quentin Tarantino Quotes

1. The good ideas will survive.  

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

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

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

5. I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.

6. Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

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

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

9. All my movies are achingly personal. 

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

11. I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie. (Rolling Stone, 2003)

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

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

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

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. I look at "Death Proof" and realize I had too much time. (hollywoodreporter.com)

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

21. I steal from every movie ever made.

22. 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.

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

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

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. I'm a historian in my own mind.

29. 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.

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

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

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

33. I've always wanted to work with Warren Beatty.

34. 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. (BBC interview)

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

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

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

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

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

40. 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.

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

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

43. 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.

44. 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.

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

46. 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.

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

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

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

50. 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.

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

52. To me, America is just another market.

53. 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.

54. Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.

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

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

57. 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.

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

59. That's when you know you've found somebody really special. When you can just shut the f... up for a minute and comfortably share silence.

60. I'm an American, our names don't mean shit.

61. 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.

62. I guess I'll have to marry Elvis Presley to get even. (on Guy Ritchie marrying Madonna)

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

64. Sure, Kill Bill's a violent movie. But it's a Tarantino movie. You don't go to see Metallica and ask the f**kers to turn the music down. (in response to criticism of there being too much violence in his movies)

65. 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. (his advice for aspiring filmmakers)

66. I hope to give you at least 15 more years of movies. I'm not going to be this old guy that keeps cranking them out.

67. I've had people write that I've seen too many movies. In what other art form would being an expert be considered a negative? If I were a poet, would I be criticized for knowing too much about Sappho? Or Aristotle?

68. I'm not James Cameron and I could never think like that - I don't think he could think like me either - but if I could go into a time machine and think like that and be able to do what he could do, that would be great. (on Avatar)

69. Watch the movie closely, and you'll see how personal it is. Here's a film in which cinema brings down the Nazi regime, metaphorically and literally. What could possibly be better than that? In this story, cinema changes the world, and I f... love that idea! (Interview with The London Paper about Inglorious Basterds)

70. Violence is a form of cinematic entertainment. (BBC interview)

71. I write movies about mavericks, about people who break rules, and I don't like movies about people who are pulverised for being mavericks. (Virgin.Net interview)

72. I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages.  (Empire magazine interview, 1994.)

73. 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. (Rolling Stone, 2003)

74. To me, torture would be watching sports on television. (Playboy interview, November issue of 1994)

75. But can I tell the genuine-article Italian from the poseur Italian? No. To me they all seem like poseurs. (Playboy interview, November issue of 1994)

76. It's an artistic calling. It's a religion. You shouldn't be doing it as just a day job, to pay for your pool or pay for your house in Barbados. You should do it when it's special, when you'd die for the movie, when the movie is your baby.

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