Stanley Kubrick Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

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.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

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.

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.

Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.