Quotes from Guillermo del Toro

For me, real life is hard work. Making movies is like a vacation for my soul.

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.

For horror to work, you have to be afraid. You have to keep the monster in a black and white light.

Without context, things are not scary. Without context, like humor, horror doesn't work.

There is a heavy Mexican Catholic streak in my movies, and a huge Mexican sense of melodrama. Everything is overwrought, and there's a sense of acceptance of the fantastic in my films, which is innately Mexican. So when people ask, 'How can you define the Mexican-ness of your films?' I go, 'How can I not?' It's all I am.

TV now, you have to plan it: you structure it for binge watching, meaning you structure the whole season like a three-act play. You have a first act - the first third of the season - second act is the middle third, and you structure it like that.

I believe that we, every day, 24-7, all the days of our lives, we are, all of us, agents of construction and agents of destruction.

I don't think that Argentinian cinema is well-known outside Argentina the way it should be.

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.

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

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.

I have a lot of artifacts - books on witchcrafts and talismans. I have a big, big collection of original occult books from the 1800s and 1700s, and some of the oldest books on apparitions and vampires. All original printings. It's not that I'm a crazy believer, I just find it to be amazing research material.

I don't think there is life beyond death. I don't. But I do believe that we get this clarity in the last minute of our life. The titles we achieved, the honors we managed, they all vanish. You are left alone with you and your deeds and the things you didn't do.

Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' was influenced by Lovecraft big time. He wanted to make his monsters Lovecraftian. But I think many other films have been influenced by Lovecraft - like 'Alien,' which is almost an outer-space version of 'At The Mountains Of Madness.'

The reason there's a 'Hellboy 2' is not because the studios were passionate about the first one; it's because the numbers made sense.

Every project that you write about or read about, it goes through years of hard work. We write a screenplay; we design. Then you submit those and the budget, and it's out of your hands.

I'm a lapsed altar boy.

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

More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

For eight years I did effects for other movies until I got my movie made.

I'm a book guy first, and my education came from two encyclopedias. One was an encyclopedia of health, so I became morbidly obsessed with anatomy, and I thought I had trichinosis, an aneurism, jaundice! And then an encyclopedia of art.

I've been going through immigration all my life, and I've been stopped for traffic violations by cops, and they get much more curious about me than the regular guy. The moment they hear my accent, things get a little deeper.

It's a terrible thing, isn't it? To be dragged under?