Quotes from Stanley Kubrick

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.

Take a stress pill and think things over-- HAL in 2001

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

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.

The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.

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.

All my life I've always spoiled the things that meant the most to me.

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

Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.

Think [Schindler's List] was about the Holocaust?... That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. ''Schindler's List'' is about 600 who don't. Anything else?

The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.

One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.

The purpose of bayonet training is to awaken your killer instincts. The killer instinct will make you strong. If the meek ever inherit the earth the strong will take it away from them. The weak exist to be devoured by the strong. Every Marine must pack his own gear. Every Marine must be the instrument of his own salvation.

I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. —Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper

The destruction of this universe would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent... if we come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death -- however mutable man may be able to make them -- our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I'm not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone and suffering.

Barry was born clever enough at gaining a fortune, but incapable of keeping one. For the qualities and energies which lead a man to achieve the first are often the very cause of his ruin in the latter case.

You know, Michael, it's not absolutely true in every case that nobody likes a smart ass.

On Dr. Strangelove ]: My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. [...] What could be more absurd than the very idea of two mega powers willing to wipe out all human life because of an accident, spiced up by political differences that will seem as meaningless to people a hundred years from now as the theological conflicts of the Middle Ages appear to us today?

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 motion, the meaning, all that comes later.

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.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility.