Tarantino Quotes

“Foreign films, Cliff thought, were more like novels. They didn't care if you liked the main character or not. And Cliff found that intriguing.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

“So, if you're reading this cinema book, hopefully to learn a little something about cinema, and your head is swimming from all the names you don't recognize, congratulations, you're learning something”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“I don't know how he died, where he died, or where he's buried. But I do know I should've thanked him.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“It reminds me what Uma Thurman once said about actors improvising: "What most actors call improvising is just stammering and swearing. But another word for improvising is writing. And that's not what you pay actors to do.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“If you're a film fan, collecting video is sort of like marijuana. Laser discs, they're definitely cocaine. Film prints are heroin, all right? You're shooting smack when you start collecting film prints. So, I kinda got into it in a big way, and I've got a pretty nice collection I'm real proud of.”
― Quentin Tarantino

“So, if you're reading this cinema book, hopefully to learn a little something about cinema, and your head is swimming from all the names you don't recognize, congratulations, you're learning something.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“Who wants to spend three months making a fucked-up version of their movie?”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“There are very few perfect movies. This is okay, since in the pursuit of cinematic art, perfection shouldn't be the goal. Nevertheless, when it's accomplished (even by accident), it's an achievement.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“Not a single scene, situation, idea, or image that was in that screenplay was in my script for Django Unchained. Yet... the essence of what Floyd was trying to accomplish in that script, an epic western with a black heroic cowboy at its center, was the very heart of what I was trying to accomplish with Django Unchained.

But even more influential than any one script was having a man trying to be a screenwriter living in my house. Him writing, him talking about his script, me reading it, made me consider for the first time writing movies. The reason I knew how to even format a screenplay was from reading Floyd's screenplays. It would be a long read—from that year of 1978 to me completing my first feature length screenplay -True Romance- in September 1987.

But due to Floyd's inspiration I tried writing screenplays. I usually never got that far. I think thirty was by far the furthest I ever got. But I tried. And eventually succeeded.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“When you're writing for an actor like Steve - or, for that matter, any actor - you gain a lot by being able to fashion the material to their strengths. But you lose some when it comes to characterization, because you're going to avoid things that don't show off that actor in the best light.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“I still should want to watch the movie and enjoy it. Certain actors can play grotesque bad guys, yet they still have a connection to the audience. We still enjoy them as performers. They do cruel deeds, they're monsters, but we enjoy their monsters because when they're on screen we known something exciting will happen.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“So since this generation of genre directors were forced to make what at the end of the day they considered silly stories about cowboys and cops and robbers, in order to make those sill stories mean something to them, they based them in metaphors that pertained to their own lives.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and the profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“Many people back then watched the news in
abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and the profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive.
To many Americans it was a mosaic that scared the shit out of them”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“Almost every genre film made for a while was an Anti-Genre Film. With the idea behind the film being to expose the absurdity and unsavory politics that have hidden underneath said genre since the beginning of Hollywood”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“What was it about the I'll kill the bitch guy that cracked our audience up so much? Simple, everyone in the theatre had seen that guy before. I had seen that guy. And when we stepped outside the theatre into the Scottsdale shopping center where the Carson Twin Cinema was located, we might see that guy again. But what really cracked us up was we had never seen that guy in a Hollywood movie.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“Then the movie started playing like a real movie. But frankly, a more real movie than we were used to.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“Elvis movies weren't real movies, they were "Elvis Presley movies”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“How many diners should a man rob before he turns the gun on himself? The question whispered in Richie’s ear as he swallowed the last bite of pancake. He and Alabama had gotten the idea of stealing from diners when they caught Pulp Fiction at a four-year anniversary screening in the New Beverly Cinema in LA last year where they’d gone to shoot dope and drift among the neon haze of Hollywood glitz, thinking Shit, look how in love they are holding up that diner, that could be us. But a dozen diners later the charm had worn off and they’d returned to being just a couple junkie losers stuck in the small-time.”
― Philip Elliott, Porno Valley

“These Anti-Establishment Auteurs were as sorry to see the old studio system go busy as the French Revolutionaries were to see Marie Antoinette vacate Versailles”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation

“When I stepped up to the podium and looked out before the audience of L.A. critics, my first remarks to the room were: "Gee, thanks, now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation