Stanley Kubrick

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

“I am afraid of aeroplanes. I've been able to avoid flying for some time, but I suppose, if I had to, I would. Perhaps it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. At one time, I had a pilot's licence and 160 hours of solo time on single-engine light aircraft. Unfortunately, all that seemed to do was make me mistrust large aeroplanes.”

“The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive”

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

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

“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”

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

“Observation is a dying art.”

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

“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.”

“A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”

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

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

“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.”

“A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”

“Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.”