Stanley Kubrick

It takes more discipline than you might imagine to think, even for thirty seconds, in the noisy, confusing, high-pressure atmosphere of a film set. But a few seconds' thought can often prevent a serious mistake being made about something that looks good at first glance.

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.

It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.

I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don't like the book after a bit, I don't finish it. But I like to be surprised.

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.

Part of my problem is that I cannot dispel the myths that have somehow accumulated over the years. Somebody writes something, it's completely off the wall, but it gets filed and repeated until everyone believes it. For instance, I've read that I wear a football helmet in the car.

What do you take me for? A fourteen karat sucker?

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

Because I direct films, I have to live in a major English-speaking production center. That narrows it down to three places: Los Angeles, New York and London. I like New York, but it's inferior to London as a production center. Hollywood is best, but I don't like living there.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

It's a mistake to confuse pity with love.

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Here's to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it's caused me.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing and to think just as objectively when you're in trouble.

When you're making a film, you have to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip.

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.

Art consists of reshaping life, but it does not create life nor cause life.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.