Jordan Peele > Quotes

“Part of what horror is, is taking risks and going somewhere that people think you’re not supposed to be able to go, in the name of expressing real-life fears.”
― Jordan Peele

“I’m a true believer in story. I think when you just tell people to think, people tend to get resistant and defensive and feel like you’re accusing them of not thinking. But when you tell a story, and you draw them in through allowing them to see through the eyes of a different person, and when you can affect their feelings and emotions — whether it's making them laugh, or making them scared, or making them scream, or making them cheer — then you have them on a starting point, already, to think about why they had those visceral reactions.”
― Jordan Peele

“The flattening of the human experience in the last . . . I don’t know, fifty years, can point to the simulation winding down.” “Flattening?” Kam asked. “Has it seemed at all like shit’s just kind of run its course? Problems are obvious and no one’s that invested in fixing them? No new discoveries, no new ideas. All the new arguments are the same as the old arguments. Lost the plot with art and entertainment. Everything’s AI or a remix or remaster or expansion of the same five IPs.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming

“The power of story is greater than power of conversation in a way.”
― Jordan Peele

“When I'm writing a first draft I'm constantly reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
― Jordan Peele

“They thought that we were too young to understand, but children knew. We learned the lesson early, felt it down to our bones: Of all the tools of oppression, fear was the cruelest”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“I have a condition. I have a condition with an ugly name. One of the symptoms of this ugly condition is that I am afraid, profoundly, that I will be abandoned. The doctor says this fear is irrational, even though I have been abandoned before.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“Then two years ago at a Florida hospital, a newborn unfolds his jaw and eats half a nurse’s face.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“Know your place. Stay in your place. But if you build your place into something nice, they want to take it from you. All they needed was an excuse.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“Probably better to shoot than arrest her, really; dead women file no lawsuits.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“Over time, I forgot that beneath the playground of passing cars was the disturbed burial ground of people who thought they were free.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“I view horror as catharsis through entertainment. It’s a way to work through your deepest pain and fear—but for Black people that isn’t possible, and for many decades wasn’t possible, without the stories being told in the first place.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“My sister was a fool in the particular way that only someone who was too smart to be such a fool could be a fool.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“Zelda knows he’s not happy, but he won’t make a fuss, because he understands, just like Zelda, that sometimes the best monster hunters are monsters themselves.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“is he okay? of course not dumb hearts are supposed to go on the inside that’s like the number one thing about hearts”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming

“Then the cops come... That to me means all of the movie with all of this absurdity culminates to an absurdity that is so grounded it's actually real. It shows you that all of these other choices are not that crazy anymore. No matter whether or not the audience bought any of the decisions I've made--they could've viewed the brain transplants or the hypnotizing as ridiculous and fantastical--they have to acknowledge that the cop car showing up is a real threat to Chris's life. And maybe that makes them go back and reevaluate whether the other decisions were that far-fetched after all.”
― Jordan Peele, Get Out: The Complete Annotated Screenplay

“And the reason I started crying was because I realized how big and insurmountable seeming systemic racism is. It involves so many different perpetrators, it involves us, the victims, and it comes in so many different forms... A big part of the Sunken Place, to me, is the silencing of our voice, the silencing of our screams, what we as a culture did to Colin Kaepernick for using his voice, the silencing of that voice, or the attempted silencing of that voice. And the beauty of what many great civil rights leaders, specifically Martin Luther King Jr., taught us is that our voice is the weapon we have against violence, against oppression, against hatred. So, the silencing of that voice, it comes in prison, it comes in athletes, it comes in the lack of representation of Black people in horror movies, and any part of this industry.”
― Jordan Peele, Get Out: The Complete Annotated Screenplay

“I’ll show you who’s crazy,” I whisper.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“The power of story is greater than power of conversation in a way”
― Jordan Peele

“Then two years ago at a Florida hospital, a newborn unfolds his jaw and eats half a nurse’s face. And you think, it’s Miami, it happens, until the video comes in.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“Jesus better keep his little bitch mouth shut.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“WHITE BOY #4 There is an enormous tragedy at work, though I don’t think it’s the one we might think it is. (thumbs his chin as the Death Note detective music starts playing)”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“I swear, there must be some genetic well of low self-esteem that makes humans look for something, anything, to worship. Give us a glimpse of a more powerful, sentient entity and some of us will offer up our wombs as incubators.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“Jesus better keep his little bitch mouth shut”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming

“Five, six, seven arms reaching out into the darkness. Finally, one touches the bag, and all the arms seize upon it like wild animals dragging away a carcass.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“Has it seemed at all like shit’s just kind of run its course? Problems are obvious and no one’s that invested in fixing them? No new discoveries, no new ideas. All the new arguments are the same as the old arguments. Lost the plot with art and entertainment. Everything’s AI or a remix or remaster or expansion of the same five IPs.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“This is why they fear us. They live with their secret shame, their secret terror that we might do to them what they’ve done to us. We don’t depend on them, don’t need them. We ‘don’t know our place,’ and they see that we’re a well-armed militia.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“It was the sensation of the unknown becoming more than some abstract thought. It was present and tangible and clammy to the touch, burrowed so viscerally inside of and surrounding her, she was sure she could see it if only she had some fucking light”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“The local megachurch has them everywhere, trying to scare people into buying their pastor another beach house.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

“sometimes the best monster hunters are monsters themselves.”
― Jordan Peele, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror