Todd Solondz Quotes

Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.

Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can't celebrate humanity but I'm not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence.

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

Usually the audience has no idea that the censored version of whatever movie they're watching isn't the original.

And that's just what I'm saying. I would never want to be like certain people, who change the way they dress, go out in disguise, wear a big floppy hat and dark shades. I would hate that.

Part of it has to do with this business of being approached in public. I have a distinctive look - it's partly the glasses I wear - and people seem to remember me once they've seen me.

Casting is everything. If you get the right people they make you look good.

It's one of the great gifts of having so little money that you are able to make these kinds of radical conceits that you could never afford to do had you had a reasonable budget,.

Some directors hardly talk to the actors at all.

I mean, I don't want to sound - of course it's very nice, people come up and say appreciative things about my work. But the loss, in terms of privacy and anonymity, is no small thing to me.

All I mean is, I'm not the kind of audience comedy directors want at a test screening because I seldom laugh, and if I do, it's not very loud. That doesn't mean I don't like the movie.

In particular, people have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them.

Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.

Artwork can be a portal, a kind of rethinking and reseeing of the world as we live it.

Compromise is part and parcel of making a movie. It's a question of the kinds of compromises that you have to make.

If I grew up in a different background, I could see myself getting a gun and shooting an abortionist. That's my job, to imagine what could happen, what can make people go in different directions.

I love working with actors. If you cast the right person in the right part at the right time, they make you look like a better writer and director than you really are.

I love working with actors. I do.

When I go to the movies, I do like to see things that surprise me, a little bit, in ways that seem truthful to the world that we live in.

I don't make movies with the idea that people are going to walk out of them feeling comfortable or better about themselves or more secure in their own biases or opinions.

I think success is a lot more healthy than failure.

There are a lot of ideas I have that I think would be very marketable and commercial, but they're not as compelling to me as the ones that are unmarketable, uncommercial, and unprofitable.

I always make mistakes and I always fix things up, as best I can, in the cutting room.

I always have to presume that each movie is my last movie because I never know if I'll get money again.

You always have to be ahead of the audience so that they have to always catch up and know the movie's not quite going exactly where you think it's going, or expecting it to be going.

I can't please everybody and I don't try to. If I can please myself that's enough. For the rest, I just hope for the best.

A movie takes on its own life, and you have to respect that and be open to it.

I've always said that I myself am not the best audience for my own work, because I'm just not that receptive to comedy.

People cant help how they look.

Like everything, what compels one to put pen to paper is a great question.

But anonymity is very important to me, and I don't want to be recognized in public more than I already am.

When I'm asked who my audience is, I say someone with an open mind, which is not a vacant one and sometimes a liberal mind is not the same thing as an open one.

One thing I want to say: I don't like victim stories and I don't write them.

The funny thing is, strangers still seem to feel comfortable coming up to me and saying things, but now usually it’s because they recognize me, and they say nice things.