Guillermo del Toro famous quotes

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

#Country #Teenager #Video

I think Hollywood has a habit of developing 100 times more than they actually shoot.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Thinking #Hollywood #Habit

My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Mexican #Suitcases #Life Is

I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget. That no matter what budget you're doing, you should be dreaming bigger than the budget you have, and then it's a matter of reigning it in to the reality. You try to make things count.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Dream #Ambition #Reality

If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist.... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Artist #Bullshit #Levels

...to all the monsters in my nursery: May you never leave me alone.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Nurse #Leave Me Alone #May

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.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Thinking #People #Way

You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility, I think.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Responsibility #Thinking #Finding Yourself

For eight years I did effects for other movies until I got my movie made
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Eight #Years #Made

Studios look backward. Filmmakers look forward.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Looks #Filmmaker

I was an altar boy, a spokesperson for the Virgin Mary, I was a choir boy but then at the age of 14 I discovered masturbation and all that went out the window.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Boys #Age #Window

I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don't see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with cinema.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Halloween #Independent #Cinema

You’ll meet her. She’s very pretty, even though sometimes she’s sad for many days at a time. You’ll see, when she smiles, you’ll love her.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Sometimes

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.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Art #Believe #Struggle

The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Butterfly #Self #Doe

Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Firsts #Ends #Spectrum

Films are fantastic - they are one of the peaks of human narrative. But I'm sorry to break the news to the movie industry: So is a video game.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Sorry #Games #Video

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
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Insanity #Insane #Doe

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

#Believe #Men #World

for in the absence of God he had found Man. Man killing man, man helping man, both of them anonymous: the scourge and the blessing.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Blessing #Men #Helping

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.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Ghouls #Two #Vampire

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Monsters #Firsts #Wells

The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Cities #People #Monsters

Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Genius #Mystery #Abyss

video games are the comic books of our time... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia".
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Book #Games #Gains

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

#Spiritual #Might #Maternal Love

The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Kings #Journey #Tourists

Power revealed is power sacrificed. The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Powerful #Unseen #Way

But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Thinking #Ghost Stories #Devil

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

#Mad #Madness #Stills

We're in three living groups, 'cause even after the world's ended some ***** still can't get along.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Groups #Three #World

What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Men #Thinking #Choices

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Ideas #Diaries #Brilliant

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.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Movie #Two #Cinema

You have to believe the magic to see it.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Believe #Magic

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

#Heart #Uncomplicated

I like John Carpenter. I like some of his films more than others
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Film #Carpenter

Survival often feels like an indignity.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Survival #Feels #Indignity

What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone’s library is like peeking into their DNA.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Dna #Profound #Library

Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple…when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Wise #Clever #Believe

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…
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Real #Night #Light

It’s as hard to explain as a sexual proclivity. Some guys like high-heeled shoes. I like horror.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Shoes #Guy #Horror

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.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Blood #Honor #Faces

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Liars #Writing #Reality

You think if you work hard enough, you can fix the precious things you've broken - rather than being careful with them in the first place.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Hard Work #Thinking #Broken

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Bored

What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Firsts #Geek #Film

I think there are movies that are so gigantic that you need a second unit
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Thinking #Needs #Units

There is beautiful in the grotesque.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Beautiful #Grotesque

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

#Desire

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.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Art #Mean #Intuition

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

#Dark #Monsters #Insects

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

#Joy #Half #World

I absolutely am a big Call of Duty fan. Every time a new Call of Duty comes out – I never play the games online, but I play the solo version super fast. My family knows not to interrupt me the day they come out, they know it's a sacred date for me. I think my favorite visually, of all of the Call of Duty games - even if it's not as sassy and high tech - is World at War because, that game has some really incredible episodes in Berlin and the Japanese fields. It's really quite arresting for me, visually, and it was very immersive. But I love Modern Warfare, too.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#War #Sassy #Thinking

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.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Hippie #Past #Thinking

Frankfurt, discussing a stuntman: He missed being killed in that shot be literally half an inch.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Half #Inches #Shots

For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Devil #Backbone #Neurotic

They're getting more and more experience on what to expect, and the Hellboy audience is such a faithful and fanatic audience as I am, and you have to really be very open about what you do
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Faithful #Audience

There are men who bloom in chaos. You call them heroes or villains, depending on which side wins the war, but until the battle call they are but normal men who long for action, who lust for the opportunity to throw off the routine of their normal lives like a cocoon and come into their own. They sense a destiny larger than themselves, but only when structures collapse around them do these men become warriors.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#War #Hero #Winning

I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Thinking #Quiet

I started when I was eight, doing super 8 films
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Eight #Film

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

#Attitude #Actors #Pantomime

Well I think effects are tools
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Thinking #Tools #Wells

I think that The Eye is a particularly Americanized take on horror
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Eye #Thinking #Horror

Never fly commercial. That's the moral of this story.
-- Guillermo del Toro

#Stories #Moral