Stanley Kubrick Quotes

The screen is a magic medium.

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

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

I used and abused drugs and alcohol. When I stopped doing that it became a lot clearer that life goes from inside to giving as opposed to taking and destroying.

Take a stress pill and think things over-- HAL in 2001

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

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.

Everybody has their black moments.

Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.

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.

One does not have to make Frank Capra movies to like people.

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.

My reputation has grown slowly.

Have you ever had a single moment's thought about my responsibilities?

What do you take me for? A fourteen karat sucker?

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

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

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem

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

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.

Private Joker is silly and he's ignorant but he's got guts and guts is enough.

Know what it is the emotional statement to convey, and use taste and judgement to help the actors give their best possible performance.

Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.

Anybody who runs is a VC. Anybody who stands still is a well-disciplined VC.

I didn't want murder. It's all gone wrong.

I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.

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.

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.

How does anybody ever think of anything?

Don't do anything. Just tolerate me and let me suffer, knowing how you feel.

All my life I've always spoiled the things that meant the most to me.

You either care or you don’t.

Observation is a dying art.

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

The truth of a thing is the feel of it not the think of it.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters and the small nations like prostitutes.

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