Films Quotes

“It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.”
― Nick Hornby

“People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"

[Interview in The Independent, 15 October 2005]”
― Lemmy Kilmister

“You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies."
Steve Martin”
― Steve Martin

“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.”
― Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies

“People who LIKE movies have a favorite. People who LOVE movies couldn't possibly choose.”
― Nicole Yatsonsky

“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.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“Hollywood is bigger down right now by sequels, by the uninspired. Well, my M.O. is a two-hour feast for your senses. That means starting the concept of filmmaking from scratch, making it your own.”
― Lee Matthew Goldberg, Slow Down

“I hate most people. And I don’t want to, it’s an awful way to be. But the human race gives me no comfort. I find myself turning to books and films for comfort still. It’s repulsive, because one’s life consists of people, not things.”
― Morrissey

“Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.”
― William Burroughs

“Every great film should seem new every time you see it."
Roger Ebert”
― Roger Ebert

“I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“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?"
Stanley Kubrick”
― Stanley Kubrick

“The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set”
― Federico Fellini

“Social Note: I have sought escape in the Prytania on more than one occasion, pulled by the attractions of some technicolored horrors, filmed abortions that were offenses against any criteria of taste and decency, reels and reels of perversion and blasphemy that stunned my disbelieving eyes, the shocked my virginal mind, and sealed my valve.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."
Andy Warhol”
― Andy Warhol

“Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man.
Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.
”
― Billy Wilder, Some Like It Hot

“Films might get to you and your subconscious and make a little difference, but when the vigilante drum beats, the mob screams and the conformists go along with it. There have to be people who are non-conformists.”
― Oliver Stone

“That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.”
― Connie Willis, Remake

“When the lights go off in a movie theatre, everyone becomes this one entity: the audience watching the film. And most films aim to get the same emotions out of people. The same reactions. To laugh or be scared or cry or be inspired. The audience goes in as individuals and comes out as people who’ve all experienced the same thing, are all feeling the same way.”
― Kheryn Callender, This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story

“It's an obsession of mine, that different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing, but for different reasons. I try to make films which connect people.”
― Krzysztof Kieślowski

“If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more.”
― Gregory Peck

“Il y a des livres qu'il devrait être interdit de lire trop tôt. On passe à côté ou á travers. Et de films aussi. On devrait mettre dessus une étiquette: Ne pas voir ou ne pas lire avant d'avoir vécu”
― Jean-Michel Guenassia, Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes

“The Godfather, A Place in the Sun, Dodsworth, Galaxy Quest--these are perfect films. They start with a simple premise and proceed logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable. [From the chapter "The Script."]”
― David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business

“Movies are not good or bad because of their subjects but because of their treatments of their subjects. Any plot can be made into trash, and probably any plot can be made into greatness.”
― Roger Ebert

“Films, more than any other media, have saved my life.”
― Don Roff

“Am Wagemut, an der Energie der Amerikaner können wir uns ein Bespiel nehmen, aber der amerikanische Tonfilm wird sich nicht über die Grenzen hinaus entwickeln, die die von einigen Finanzmächtigen geleitete öffentliche Meinung zieht. Er wird technisch brillant werden, aber als Dokument und künstlerische Wahrheit nur in Ausnahmefällen sich durchsetzen.”
― Ernst Toller, Quer durch: Reisebilder und Reden

“To recall the extent to which Hitchcock was marked by his petit bourgeois interpellation may not radically change the way we read his films. It should, however, remind us that his British films in particular come out of a highly class-structured and class-conscious social formation and are likely to bear the traces of this, even if only in their interstices.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“Regional films are the heart and soul of diverse storytelling, yet they're often sidelined for mainstream glitz.”
― Dipti Dhakul, Quote: +/-

“Why the push to be "immortal"? No one can outlast the stars. Not the monuments, films, books, and all the receptacles of memory humans try so hard to build like so many anthills in a giant forest.”
― Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

“As genres, the Malayalam and Tamil flms we saw were the polar opposites of each other. The Malayalam flms, deeply infuenced by the left, were about hunger, famine, unemploy-
ment, landlordism and political rage. The Tamil flms (which also played in Kerala) that Kurussammal and I went to see were about kings and slaves, and Hindu gods and goddesses who cavorted with their consorts in the clouds with oversize musical instruments. Neither genre ofered me any kind of solace or escape. For women, mortal or divine, they only valorized abso-lute submission to the python- coils of tradition and convention. According to them, my bones would be broken, and when I turned to mush, I would be swallowed whole, sentenced to pick-ing my husband ’s letters of the floor.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me