Quentin Tarantino quotes:

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  • 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.

  • My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I'll be manager. Ill be the crazy old movie guy.

  • 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.

  • I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.

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

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

  • 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 love Elmore Leonard. To me, True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie.

  • I cannot get myself interested in video games. I've been given video game players and they just sit there connected to my TVs gathering dust until eventually I unplug them so I can put in another special-region DVD player.

  • It's a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody's arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.

  • My mom took me to see Carnal Knowledge and The Wild Bunch and all these kind of movies when I was a kid.

  • The good ideas will survive.

  • 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'm not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.

  • CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the '70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They're really doing it and risking their lives.

  • My earliest childhood memories are of watching Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. I remember not liking Frankenstein then and going, "Who is this bald guy?" But I love it now.

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

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

  • I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.

  • As a viewer, the minute I start getting confused, I check out of the movie. Emotionally, I'm severed.

  • I want to have the fun of doing anime and I love anime, but I can't do storyboards because I can't really draw and that's what they live and die on.

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

  • Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.

  • 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.

  • I don't believe in putting in music as a band aid to get you over some rough parts or bad film making. If it's there it's got to add to it or take it to another level.

  • 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.

  • If I wasn't a film-maker, I'd be a film critic. It's the only thing I'd be qualified to do.

  • I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards - in the life of an artist.

  • One thing I don't understand is that average American movie-goers cannot watch a movie for three hours, yet they'll watch a stupid, boring, horrific football game for four hours. Now, that is boredom at its most colossal.

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

  • 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.

  • The film [Django] really has a lot of ups and downs, and taps into a lot of different emotions. To me, the trick was balancing all those emotions, so that I could get you where I wanted you to be by the very end. I wanted the audience cheering in triumph at the end.

  • 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.

  • When you gotta go out and make a movie to pay for the kid's private school and for the three ex-wives, don't talk to me about your artistry. It's their job. It's not my job. It's my calling.

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

  • I've always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

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

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

  • I see characters lying all the time in a lot of Hollywood movies. They can't do this because it would affect the movie this way or that or this demographic might not like it. To me a character can't do anything good or bad, they can only do something that's true or not.

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

  • I was trying to do like a Spaghetti Western but using World War II iconography.

  • I don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker. If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.

  • I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.

  • It's nice to get invited to the parties and to be able to hobnob and celebrate a job well done with your colleagues.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Sure, Kill Bill is a violent movie. But it's a Tarantino movie. You don't go to see Metallica and ask the fu*kers to turn the music down.

  • I've always been passionate about these different (film) genres. Kung fu movies, samurai movies, Japanese movies, all this kind of stuff, and my love for it, and just trying to present it in a way that other people can love it as much as I do.

  • 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.

  • If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.

  • If the film isn't suspenseful, i.e. the pressure cooker situation of what's going on in the movie, if that's not part of it, if the threat of violence and the temperature isn't always going up a notch every scene or so, then the movie is going to be boring. It's not going to work.

  • I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.

  • I hope to give you at least 15 more years of movies. I`m not going to be this old guy that keeps cranking them out. My plan is to have a theater by that time in some small town and I will be the manager this crazy old movie guy.

  • To call Clive Barker a 'horror novelist' would be like calling the Beatles a 'garage band'... He is the great imaginer of our time. He knows not only our greatest fears, but also what delights us, what turns us on, and what is truly holy in the world. Haunting, bizarre, beautiful.

  • I live in the Hollywood Hills. When I see a cop driving around there, I actually assume that he has my best interests at heart and that he has the best interests of my property at heart. I think if you'd go to Pasadena, they'd say the same thing. And I think if you knocked on doors in Glendale and asked them, they'd say the same thing.

  • Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

  • Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.

  • Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

  • Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.

  • I've always thought my soundtracks do pretty good, because they're basically professional equivalents of a mix tape I'd make for you at home.

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

  • Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.

  • And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my fingers upon thee!

  • I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.

  • Violence in real life is terrible; violence in movies can be cool. It's just another colour to work with.

  • Suddenly, Westerns, which were our action films and what the working man went to see to blow off steam and have a good time, became boring to most people growing up from the Eighties on, because they're kind of pastoral.

  • I've always wanted to work with Warren Beatty.

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

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

  • I've always thought John Travolta is one of the greatest movie stars Hollywood has ever produced.

  • I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.

  • 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.

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

  • I'm a historian in my own mind.

  • I look at 'Death Proof' and realize I had too much time.

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

  • "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.

  • ... Revenge, ... All of a sudden, revenge started brewing in the back of their minds.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • All my movies are achingly personal.

  • American Indians would, you know, scalp them and desecrate the bodies, you know, tie them to cactuses or bury them in anthills or things like that, and you know, cut up the bodies and stuff. And then the other enemy soldiers would come across and find their comrades laying there, ripped apart, and they would be sickened by it and it would scare them.

  • And by banning [smartphones] from the set, the whole crew tends to work tighter with each other. And then it just becomes a thing where people kind of fall in love with the idea, 'This is the film-industry that I signed up for! This is really wonderful.' But then they go back to another set and everybody's on their cellphone, everyone's in their own little box, and they get depressed about it.

  • And there's wordplay and there's rhythms and you have to be able to get the poetry out of it. You have to be able to sell my jokes. And if you're talking about somebody like Sam Jackson, they do that. Sam Jackson can do that. Sam Jackson can turn it into the spoken word that it was always meant to be and he can sell my jokes. And Christopher Walken can do it and a lot of people can do it, all right.

  • And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is now it's really easy to get scripts and stuff but back then, you know, oftentimes you'd buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know what happened in the scene.

  • Apache have the strongest nation in the world behind them. So we're going to inflict pain where our European aunts and uncles had to endure it. And so the fact that you could actually get Nazis scared of a band of Jews, that's - again, that's a gigantic psychological thing.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Between men and women, all the time there is tension. I feel it. A woman walks down the street, and I'm going back, and suddenly there is this tension. I just walk down the street, we were just on the way. And she thinks I'm a rapist. And now I feel guilty, even though I'm a damn poor did not.

  • But can I tell the genuine-article Italian from the poseur Italian? No. To me they all seem like poseurs.

  • But the truth of the matter is, that was fairly, fairly early on in Goebbels' 800 movies that he made in Germany. The majority of them, especially once the war got going, you hardly saw Nazi officers in it at all. They were mostly musicals and comedies and melodramas and stories of great German men from the past.

  • 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.

  • Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He's weak... he's unsure of himself... he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.

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

  • Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.

  • Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It's when a scene works emotionally and it's cool and clever, then it's great. That's what you want.

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

  • Everybody always talks about the science fiction genre, in particular, which always makes me think about people in spaceships. I can appreciate that, but that's not really where I think my dramatist aspect lies.

  • Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.

  • 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.

  • Hamburgers! The corner-stone of any nutritious breakfast.

  • He musta thought it was white boy day. It ain't white boy day, is it?

  • I actually thought that the idea of doing a World War II movie in the guise of a spaghetti western would just be an interesting way to tackle it. Just even the way that the spaghetti westerns tackled the history of the Old West, I thought it could be a neat thing to do that with World War II, but just as opposed to using cowboy iconography, using World War II iconography as kind of the jumping-off point.

  • I always knew I wanted to do a Western. And trying to think of what that would be, I always figured that if I did a Western, it would have a lot of the aesthetics of Spaghetti Westerns, because I really like them.

  • I always thought it was a B.S. thing that they didn't show it [scalping] in other Westerns, but especially if you're going to really go with the idea that we're desecrating the bodies, and the idea is to strike fear in the hearts of other German soldiers, then we had to see what they're talking about.

  • I always wanted to do a movie that deals with America's horrific past with slavery, but the way I wanted to deal with it is - as opposed to doing it as a huge historical movie with a capital H - I thought it could be better if it was wrapped up in genre.

  • I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.

  • I am doing what I'm doing, and if you don't like it, don't go see it.

  • I am not going to tell you how I believe, but I do believe in God.

  • I appreciate the female foot, but I've never said that I have a foot fetish. But I am a lower track guy. I like legs' I like booties'. I have a black male sexuality.

  • I cut the scene out, but there was a moment where Christoph Waltz plays the piano in 'Django [Unchained]' - Jamie [Foxx] is a magnificent piano-player but there's never a moment where Django plays the piano.

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

  • I definitely have some colleagues that I respect, and we get together from time to time. But I actually have just like genuine friends. Paul Thomas Anderson is a genuine friend. Robert Rodriguez is a genuine friend. Rick [Richard] Linklater is a genuine friend. Eli Roth is a genuine friend. And so is Edgar Wright.

  • I didnt go to film school, i went to films

  • I didn't want my script to get too out of control like that. So I actually made it a point not to do stuff like that, to pretty - to keep it more sparse than it's been in the last few years, or the last decade.

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