Guillermo Del Toro Quotes

Night is real. Night is not an absence of light, but in fact, it is daytime that is a brief respite from the looming darkness ...

I think that The Eye is a particularly Americanized take on horror.

I have a sort of a fetish for insects, clockwork, monsters, dark places, and unborn things

Eph too had been turned. Not from human to vampire, but from healer to slayer.

The most intelligent of creatures often make the fewest sounds.

Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge
the abyss.

There are two levels of vampirism: one is the regular vampire, which is just like it has always been; and then there's the super vampires, which are a new breed we've created.

Hidden in every limitation lies an opportunity. And for every obstacle you face, there is a simple and perfect solution, creatively. And your work is to find it. Where it gets tough is you need to fucking find it in five minutes.

When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.

You simplify because you cannot believe. You reduce; you diminish. Because you were raised to doubt and debunk. To reduce to a small set of knowns for easy digestion. Because you are a doctor, a man of science, and because this is America - where everything is known and understood, and God is a benevolent dictator, and the future must always be bright.

The fairies in the ancient notion of fairies, they are not positive and cute and twinkly.They can be incredibly nasty or they can be incredibly benign. It's a really interesting mythology when you dig into it.

I think damage to the eye or damage to the teeth is one of the most universally cringing things you can do in a movie and these are very fragile sounds.

I believe in man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world.

Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live; his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.

For me, lost causes are the only ones that are worth fighting for. The other stuff is not worth fighting for.

As a first-time director, you cannot have final cut. But as a producer, you can have final cut.

Cars get girl names. Guns get guy names. What do knives get?

It's important for little girls to know not every story has to be a love story and for boys to know that soldiers aren't the only ones to triumph in war.

If film making is magic, there's a difference between close up magic and David Copperfield. If you're doing close up magic, which independent filmmakers do, it is a very delicate craft, interpersonal relationship, and being able to enrapture a very small audience.

When you see something or experience something extraordinary, you can't go back to normal ... I think that that's the way I see the supernatural-as happening in mundane circumstances or to people who are unprepared.

Awareness of insanity does not make one any less insane. Awareness of drowning does not make one any less of a drowning person
it only adds the burden of panic

To all the monsters in my nursery: May you never leave me alone.

At some point, in order to gain his identity, the kid goes "I'm not my dad" or "I'm not my mom."

Zombie Sky. No: Zombies of the Eclipse. Zombies of the Occultation. Occult Zombies from the Planet Moon!

...the reality of the days washed away the possibilities of the past, and time moved on.

I think that in the past, in the '50s and '60s, after the existentialists and beatniks and hippie movements, the big deal was, Don't sell out. We live in a society that by virtue of the speed we communicate and sell, everything sells. The danger is buying in; that your concern becomes success, rather than fulfillment. They're two different beasts, and my feeling is that you should seek fulfillment. You should not measure your worth in how much you have or how popular you are, but how happy you are with what you do.

The raindrops were tears too. The whole world was crying.

But Felix was no longer Felix. He was a vampire motherfucker.

People think you're like The Godfather, waiting for scripts to come in. But, you're hustling, you're desperate, you're panicked and you're horrified. The movie you think you're going to do next, you don't do. The movie you think you're never going to do, you make.

In that, Blade 2 is very much like a rock concert ... if it's too loud, you're too old.

There's nothing that defines who you are more than boundaries, whether you cross them or not, in every aspect of your life, and horror is a really great boundary.

: There are only two on-buttons for fear, in any permutation you want. One is when something that shouldn't be is, meaning a presence. And, the other one is an absence.

I guess a vampire doesn't have much need for good hygiene.

Man should be better than monsters.

Ah, but who are the monsters?

Normally my clients were my mother, my grandmother, and my dad, and I would sell them the issues with a great color cover. There was a story I remember called 'The Invader,' and it had an invisible dome covering a city, with a giant tentacled monster eating everybody in sight, and people trying to drill a hole in the dome. And I did these epic Prismacolor pencil illustrations and sold out the three issues to my captive audience.

People who have lived their whole lives feeling half-complete. Who never truly fit anywhere in the world. Who never understood why they were here, or what they were meant for. Who never answered the call, because they never heard it. Because nothing ever spoke to them.

What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek.

Miriam Sacher had survived polio as a child. To Abraham, she was simply the most exquisite little bird who could not fly.

I'd grab the camera and tell people what to do, and when I was 14, someone told me that it was called directing.

I thought the tooth fairy was a very creepy concept as a kid. "Put your tooth under the pillow." I was like "Why does someone want my teeth?".

I'm serious, Jim. You need to put this crap away. You walk into school on Monday talking to me, or anyone else, about the city's pesky troll problem, and you're not exactly going to get a lot of people saying, 'Gee, thanks for the warning.' It'll spread faster than mono. You think things are tough for us now? Jim, this will be the end. I'm sorry if you had a crazy nightmare. I really am. But I can't let you ruin our lives.

Survival often feels like an indignity.

I was directing before I knew it was called that.

You need to adjust your compass to an obtainable goal.

I only produce directors and movies that I have a lot in common with.

In the end, perfection is just a concept - an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.

Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness -

I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.

Imagine, there is almost no possibility for a foreign language film to be distributed in America right now. That doesn't just make the industry poorer, it makes the landscape of cinema poorer, in America. The impossibility to get a good release on a really good European, Latin American, Asian movie is a tragedy.

For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.

All art is portraiture and all art is political: those are the things that you cannot avoid. When someone sees you in your entirety for who you are, that's the greatest act of love, because it's granting you existence. And the rarest act of love is, like cinema, to see.

Your heart is uncomplicated. It knows what it knows and acts accordingly. Greater wisdom is hard to find.

Is it ... can we ... is it safe?"
Tub checked the lot but he seemed unconcerned.
"Coach Lawrence nabbed him for practice. We live to fight another day, soldier."
"No ... I mean, the thing ... is it ... ?"
Tub frowned.
"The thing. Hmmm. Can you be more specific?
I clutched at the bumper and raised myself to unsteady feet. I patted the truck bed, taking solace in the cake of dust. It was real; I was not caught in a nightmare. I smeared the dust with my fingers and smelled it.
"If you lick that, we're no longer friends," Tub said.

He paused in the hallway, sniffing the air. He scowled, sniffed some more. He pressed an intercom button on the wall.
"Betty, I distinctly smell sewage. Could you get a plumber out here ASAP?"
Several curly hairs fluttered in the air after he was gone.
I clutched at the arm of the dentist chair.
"This isn't a joke, Tub! I'm in trouble. We're all in trouble, the whole town, the whole world! You have no clue. You have no idea what kind of things we're dealing with here. There's a whole land of

Weakness is giving in to temptation. Strength is resisting it.

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

I like John Carpenter. I like some of his films more than others.

She holds him, he holds her, they hold each other, and all is dark, all is light, all is ugliness, all is beauty, all is pain, all is grief, all is never, all is forever.

The way I see film is I think film is like going out to dinner. I feel it's a banquet. You don't want to have the same food you have at home. You want to go and eat a fantastic Chinese meal or Italian or Greek.

I love the idea of creating a sort of nuanced portrait of kids that they're not all perfect. They're kind of misfits but not in a picturesque, hip way, they're really, really kids that are not entirely great.

My favorite novel in the world is Frankenstein. I'm going to misquote it horribly, but the monster says, "I have such love in me, more than you can imagine. But, if I cannot provoke it, I will provoke fear."

I love the creation of these things - I love the sculpting, I love the coloring. Half the joy is fabricating the world, the creatures.

When I was a teenager there was no video in my country. Betamax came to Mexico very slowly.

And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight.

What you fought was a dead man, possessed by a disease.' - Setrakian
'What
like a pinche zombie?' - Gus
'Think more along the lines of a man with a black cape. Fangs. Funny accent. Now take away the cape and fangs. The funny accent. Take away anything funny about it.' - Setrakian

Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined.

When you shoot in America, you have huge beams of sunlight in the windows, very vivid sunlight - it's faster in a way.

By God, Giles thinks, it's true: They are not so different from each other. Giles might still, under the right light, bathed in the right water, be beautiful, too.

Watching a movie for the first time is a flirt. Rewatching it, is a date.

Well I think effects are tools.

We are such skeptics that we find it difficult to believe in God and angels and a spiritual afterlife, but a moment of fear makes our spirit so vulnerable that it allows us to believe in something beyond that.

I think there are movies that are so gigantic that you need a second unit.

The only thing you can do as an artist is to come to the world, see what no one is doing, and leave behind one or two things that wouldn't have happened without you.

There's something worse than not making a movie. It's doing it for the wrong reasons. Then you end up putting three, four, five years of your life into it and you come out with a thing that you're not proud of.

Without context, things are not scary. Without context, like humor, horror doesn't work.

It is not faith that distinguishes our real leaders. It is doubt. Their ability to overcome it.

I only produce movies that have something stylistically different, so that I can learn from the experience of producing.

One must always name a weapon. You cannot trust that which you cannot call by name.

In the face of such terror and dehumanization, human passion itself was an act of defiance.

In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.

Nora said, "I thought vampires drank virgin blood. They hypnotize ... they turn into bats ... " Setrakian said, "They are much romanticized. But the truth is more ... how should I say?" "Perverse," said Eph. "Disgusting," said Nora.

I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don't see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with the rest of cinema.

This is what the beginning of the end of the world will look like

The reality is that I feel that fear is a very spiritual emotion.

With every movie I produce, I learn something. I watch the directors. It's like the relationship you have with your children. I'm there to learn from my daughters. They are the perfect spirits.

Libraries don't keep secrets; they reveal them.

Her mother said fairy tales didn't have anything to do with the world, but Ofelia knew better. They had taught her everything about it.

An old man's beliefs matter little. I am the past. You, the future. What are your beliefs?

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.

I always thought what if you took a myth of childhood like the tooth fairy and made it a central scary thing. We did it on Hellboy and we did it on 'Don't be afraid of the dark'.

The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you've been harboring since you were 7.

Eons of loneliness, and then one day your ellipsis peaks toward that of another planet and there is a gasp of nearness. Wouldn't you try to make the most of it? Wouldn't you, too, combust and flare and explode if you had to?

There are a lot of period movies where they say, 'This is a portrait of Lady Whatever.' And it's done in like a 1950s or 60s style.

I think part of making movies is dealing with restrictions of freedom and budget. I'd rather deal with restrictions of budget. It's better to feel free within any budget.

You live and die two or three times making a movie. First, you write it, and the first pivotal moment comes when you can get it made. The second is in the process of making it, when the movie reveals itself to you, its flaws and its virtues. Then the most unnerving moment is when that movie is then launched into the world. It's like bringing your kid to the first day at school and somebody points out that it has bowlegs, it is cross-eyed, or it's gorgeous. You feel very exposed.

If at age 10 I say there are monsters in the basement and they don't believe it, I would have stayed in that house. My father would have said "Shut up and get to your room." So I thought the only sanctioned tyranny in the world is parenthood and everybody goes "Yeah." It's a dictatorship - parenthood.

THE THING WAS AN EXPERT IN HORROR, BUT THIS HUMAN HORROR INDEED EXCEEDED ANY OTHER POSSIBLE FATE. NOT ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS WITHOUT MERCY, BUT BECAUSE IT WAS ACTED UPON RATIONALLY AND WITHOUT COMPULSION. IT WAS A CHOICE. THE KILLING WAS UNRELATED TO THE LARGE WAR, AND IT SERVED NO OTHER PURPOSE THEN EVIL. MEN CHOSE TO DO THIS TO OTHER MEN AND INVENTED REASONS AND PLACES AND MYTHS IN ORDER TO SATISFY THEIR DESIRE IN A LOGICAL AND METHODICAL WAY.

There's something about maternal love - it might just be the strongest human spiritual bond there is.

In real life, what scares me is politicians, corporations and people that think they know what the world should be.