Stanley Kubrick Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.
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I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.
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You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity--no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.
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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.
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One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.
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If Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda had a baby, it would be Matthew Modine.
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Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.
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When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination.
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Have you ever had a single moment's thought about my responsibilities?
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Like the man said, can happiness buy money?
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Suppose by chance you do get picked up. What have you done? You shot a horse; that isn't first degree murder; in fact, it isn't even murder; in fact, I don't know what it is.
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Here's to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it's caused me.
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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.
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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
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Private Joker is silly and he's ignorant but he's got guts and guts is enough.
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I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.
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You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.
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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.
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I didn't want murder. It's all gone wrong.
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The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
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The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
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The hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that's going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie.