Quentin Tarantino Quotes

I don't have any one way to tell a story. I don't have any rule book of how it's supposed to be done. But I've always said that if a story would be more emotionally involving told, beginning, middle, and end, I'll tell it that way. I won't jigsaw it, just to show what a clever boy I am. I don't do anything in my script just to be clever.

Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.

I've always said Thomas Edison invented the movie camera to show people killing and kissing.

What I would do is I would just remember the scene and I'd go home and I'd write out the scene from memory. And anything I didn't remember I would just fill in the blanks myself and then go and give it to a classmate and then we'd do it.

Reservoir Dogs is a small film, and part of its charm was that it was a small film. I'd probably make it for $3 million now so I'd have more breathing room.

I don't want to deal with the underneath while I'm, you know, while I'm making it or when I'm writing it or when I'm making it, because again, I don't want to hit these nails on the head too strongly.

What if a kid goes to school after seeing Kill Bill and starts slicing up other kids? You know, I'll take that chance! Violent films don't turn children into violent people. They may turn them into violent filmmakers but that's another matter altogether.

To me "King Kong" is a metaphor for America's fear of the black male and to me that's obvious. All right, so I mean that was one of the first things I said when I was talking to a friend of mine after he saw Peter Jackson's version of "King Kong."

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.

Do i look like a beautiful blond with big tits and an ass that tastes like French vanilla ice-cream?
No. no, you don't.
Then why are you telling me all this bullshit just so you can fuck me.

Frankly, Django is an American story that needs to be told, when you think of slavery existing in this country for 245 years. In slave narratives there were all types of tales and drama and heroism and pain and love that happened during that time. That's rich material for drama! Everyone complains that there are no new stories left to tell. Not true, there are a whole bunch of them, and they're all American with a capital A.

To me, torture would be watching sports on television.

I definitely have some colleagues that I respect, and we get together from time to time. But I actually have just like genuine friends.

Even Christoph Waltz's character, Colonel Landa in 'Inglourious Basterds', I never judged him.

You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.

I like a much more Japanese style of blood, where it's red and it almost has a paint kind of quality to it. You can put it on metal, and it has this vividness. Because, normally, what they use in Hollywood is this stuff that looks like strawberry pancake syrup or raspberry pancake syrup.

A thing when I was writing the movie [The hateful eight] was, I hate The Confederate cause. I've always felt that they are our Nazis and the rebel flag was our swastika. So I totally have no love for that whole romance for that Antebellum time period.

When I was on The View, Barbara Walters was asking me about the blood and stuff, and I said, 'Well, you know, that's a staple of Japanese cinema.' And then she came back, 'But this is America.' And I go, 'I don't make movies for America. I make movies for planet Earth.'

I do feel that I need to do at least one more Western - I think you need to make three Westerns to call yourself a Western director.

There was that last blast of Westerns that came out in the Seventies, those Vietnam/Watergate Westerns where everything was about demystification. And I like that about those movies.

A lot of them [Germaqn actors] could come in and we could speak for the next nine hours in English and there would be no problem. It was - but it was - English wasn't the language for them to read poetry in. And there is a - there's a poetic quality to my dialogue.

A movie doesn't have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those things well and gives you a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that's good enough.

I'm a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.

I had so much fun doing Django, and I love westerns so much that after I taught myself how to make one, it's like, 'OK, now let me make another one now that I know what I'm doing.'

The other thing is even the Jews in the course - even though metaphorically aligning themselves with Indians, and, you know, you have genocide aligning itself with another genocide.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first.

I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away.

I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can't ever remember a time when I didn't.

I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.

"Dukes of Hazzard" or something you could, you know, that your work is going to be made up of that - episodic television shows. Not that I got many of them, but that was where I, but actually oddly enough though, they were teaching camera terminology at the same time in this acting class so I actually was able to understand what rack focus and whip pan and all that stuff meant.

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

I'm basically like, you know, learned pretty quickly the guy who throws the first punch usually wins, so when people gave me a hard time I just punched them.

Sometimes things need to get really bad before they can ever get better. Really bad can become untenable if enough people get sick of it. That was a big thing about why I ended up taking part in that rally [against police brutality] and ended up voicing my opinion and declaring what side I was standing on.

One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

The next movie will be in Mandarin. I enjoyed shooting all the Japanese stuff in Kill Bill so much that this whole film will be entirely in Mandarin.

Australian genre films were a lot of fun because they were legitimate genre movies. They were real genre films, and they dealt, in a way like the Italians did, with the excess of genre, and that has been an influence on me.

I mean, there's an aspect I've always said that is - it's, you know, it's not poetry but it's kind of like it. It's not song lyrics but it's kind of like song lyrics. It's not rap but it's kind of like rap. And it's not stand-up comedy but it is kind of like stand-up comedy. It's all those things together.

There's another aspect about the Seventies. Blazing Saddles, as wonderful as it was, sort of hurt the Western. It made such fun of them, that you almost couldn't take them seriously from that point on. That's why only Westerns that had the stink of Watergate or Vietnam could be taken seriously. There were so few Westerns made since then, from the Eighties on, that the few directors who did were so pleased with themselves and so happy to have the opportunity that they got lost in visuals, they got lost in the vistas and the pretty scenery.

L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.

There are two ways: my way and the highway.

I just realized that I need to be a director for two reasons. One, directors were already my heroes at this point. I wanted to - when I wanted to be an actor I wanted to work with this director. Not work with this actor, I wanted to work for this director.

You're an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I've always had is I've always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I go, hey I'd like to do that in class this Wednesday.

One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed.

I couldn't spell anything. I couldn't remember anything, but I could go to a movie and I knew who starred in it, who directed it, everything.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

All my movies are achingly personal.

My parents said, Oh, he's going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.

Besides, even if you went all the way, what would you be? Feather-weight champion of the world. Who gives a shit? I doubt you can even get a credit card based on that.
Marsellus Wallace

I liked the Hollywood stuff. But I also liked the fact that in both, you know, I guess in the, like, the auteur, the art film auteur at that time was Lina Wertmuller. So, you go see "Swept Away" or you go see a movie she did "Blood Feud" with Sophia Loren and Giancarlo Giannini. And I remember "Wifemistress" was a big movie at that time, really liked it, Laura Antonelli.

Batman is not a very interesting character. For any actor. There is simply not much to play. I think Michael Keaton did it the best, and I wish good luck to Ben Affleck. But, you know who would have made a great Batman? Alec Baldwin in the '80s.

When I make a film, I am hoping to reinvent the genre a little bit. I just do it my way. I make my own little Quentin versions of them ... I consider myself a student of cinema. It's almost like I am going for my professorship in cinema, and the day I die is the day I graduate. It is a lifelong study.

Jules Winnfield: "ENGLISH, MOTHER FUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT!?"

Samuel L. Jackson

In polite society, there is such a thing as sensitivity to some issues, as time has gone on. There was a time when we weren't politically correct, at all, and we all wince at moments when we look to the past and see that. I don't really know what the answer is, as far as that is concerned. However, me, as an artist, I don't really think about it, at all. It actually is not my job to think about that, especially in terms of me, as a writer, but also as a filmmaker. I'm not worried about the filmmaking part because, if I'm writing it, that's what I'm going to do.

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'

You know, the art films would usually be more, I mean the exploitation movies would usually be more lurid, but not that much more. I mean, actually back in those days that was what foreign films had. They had sex, they were selling Laura Antonelli.

Oddly enough, I've always - I've never actually seen "The Alamo" itself, actually. So I don't really have the association of "Green Leaves of Summer" as being "The Alamo" theme. Oddly enough, I grew up watching kung fu movies. They would use the theme "Green Leaves of Summer" in a lot of needle drops in kung fu movies a lot. So I was actually more familiar with it in a Bruce Li movie than I was actually from the John Wayne film.

I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.

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.

I was just this video-store guy and now I was actually making movies and stuff.

For those regarded as warriors ...
When engaged in combat, the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior's only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion. Kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be Lord God or Buddha himself. This truth lies at the heart of the art of combat.

Ou know, if you want to see jackbooting Nazis in movies, you've got to watch American movies made at that time.

Critics don't want to see directors they like make too much of a left turn. That's good for criticism.

You're not going to have the police force representing the black and brown community, if they've spent the last 30 years busting every son and daughter and father and mother for every piddling drug offense that they've ever done, thus creating a mistrust in the community. But at the same time, you should be able to talk about abuses of power, and you should be able to talk about police brutality and what, in some cases, is as far as I'm concerned, outright murder and outright loss of justice without the police organization targeting you in the way that they have done me.

You should be semi-embarrasse d about certain people seeing your movie.

One of the privileges you have of living the life of an artist and creating your own world and everything is the fact that, in-between times, you can kind of spend them however you want. Because, you know, once you open up your candy store again, you're open for business. And you have to be responsible. You have to be available.

That's when you know you've found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.

I'm probably only going to make 10 movies, so I'm already planning on what I'm going to do after that. That's why I'm counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.

I won't even think about acting in a role where I didn't do a back story for a character.

Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I'm not interested in, I can't even feign interest.

Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room ... I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I'm looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with.

I want to have more original-screenplay Oscars than anybody who's ever lived! So much, I want to have so many that - four is enough. And do it within ten films, all right, so that when I die, they rename the original-screenplay Oscar 'the Quentin.' And everybody's down with that.

I always do an all-night horror marathon on Saturdays where we start at seven and go until five in the morning.

The easiest way to kill a cult is to make that cult accessible.

As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.

They [American Indians] never did straight-up fights. It wasn't about, you know, getting killed in the line of fire. It was all ambush, ambush, ambush, and you ambush somebody, and then you take the scalps, and you - even though scalping wasn't created by the American Indians. It was created by the white man against Indians, and they just took it and claimed it.

Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making.

I'm definitely not on Twitter. I do have a Facebook page and Facebook friends. It's a lot of fun, especially if you don't just start friending people you don't know.

What the internet has done is destroy film criticism. I would never have guessed that the profession of film criticism would be going the way of the dodo bird.

I hate school at that time. Now, little did I know that actually if I had stayed in school I would've actually really liked college. I wasn't aware enough to know that the junior high I was suffering through would be school at its worst.

In the '50s, audiences accepted a level of artifice that the audiences in 1966 would chuckle at. And the audiences of 1978 would chuckle at what the audience of 1966 said was okay, too. The trick is to try to be way ahead of that curve, so they're not chuckling at your movies 20 years down the line.

Then they'd [Nazi] make movies against England, you know, in the same way, to help, you know, feather their nest for what they - their aggressions.

By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.

I have a lot of Chinese fans who buy my movies on the street and watch them, and I'm OK with it. I'm not OK with it in other places, but if the government's going to censor me, then I want the people to see it in any way they can.

I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.

My writing's like a journey. I'll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I'll make some of those stops and some of them I won't. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you're going to do. It's all the scenes where your characters really come from.

Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn't mean I'm anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.

If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down.

I felt no obligation to bow to any 21st Century political correctness. What I did feel an obligation to do was to take the 21stCentury viewers and physically transport them back to the ante bellum South in 1858, in Mississippi, and have them look at America for what it was back then. And I wanted it to be shocking.

I've never used High Definition video, never, ever, ever, ever, ever. And I never will. I can't stand that crap.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them.

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.

If a Million People See My Movie, I Hope They See a Million Different Movies.

I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you're not that good. You just reached the level here. I don't ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.

I loved the idea of the fact that the way, like I said, they colored outside of the lines. You know, there was rules that they didn't have to follow. And you got -you got - you could get more of a sensational thrill, all right, with some of these exploitation movies or art films, or you could get something you wouldn't see at the normal cineplex.

You know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It's the little differences.

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.