Stanley Kubrick Quotes

77 quotes in 1080 categories

• The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.
• 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…
• Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good and it trains you to think objectively when…
• The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
• 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…
• The most terrifying fact about the universe not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent
• If you really want to communicate something, even if it’s just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least…
• 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…
• I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel.…
• I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I…
• 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…
• 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…
• The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply…
• The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• If Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda had a baby, it would be Matthew Modine.
• Some people demand a five-line capsule summary. Something you'd read in a magazine. They want you to say, 'This is the story of the duality…
• Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.

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