Stanley Kubrick Quotes

“Observation is a dying art.”

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

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

“If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.”

“A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”

“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”

“Think [Schindler's List] was about the Holocaust?… That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. ‘'Schindler’s List’' is about 600 who don’t. Anything else?”

“The reason movies are often so bad out here isn't because the people who make them are cynical money hacks. Most of them are doing the very best they can; they really want to make good movies. The trouble is with their heads, not their hearts.”

“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.”

“I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner.”

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

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

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

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

“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”

“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 movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.”

“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.”

“There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.”

“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

“I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.”

“I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”

“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”

“You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.”

“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.”

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

“I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.”

“If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?…
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. … The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache … This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.”

“You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.”

“Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.”

“Include utter banalities.”