Stanley Kubrick Quotes - Page 2

Don't get obsessed with not liking a movie.

It's a mistake to confuse pity with love.

No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

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.

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.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

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

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours.

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

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

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

It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive

In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.

You either care or you don’t.

I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthromorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe.

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

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

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.