Quotes from Oliver Stone

If anything, if you can get somebody interested in something and get them excited, that's great. You should be praised for having opened the debate and having asked the right questions.

I've met people who will go to a movie that I can't stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There's something they like and identified in that movie, and I don't see it.

When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.

If you make the movie from your heart and it stands over time, that's what matters to me.

I'm trying to understand my life. The one that I've experienced.

There is a narrative to every life, and I believe in the classic mode of storytelling that goes back to Homer and carries through to today.

I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.

But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.

Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize.

A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.

It's interesting that when economic times were the hardest, that's when many people embraced liberalism.

There is this thing about time that you can't see at the time you're at.

Every time you go into a movie, you go into the point of view of who it is about.

In any film there's always a historical implication.

I love the act of writing. I like the quiet, internal aspect of it. If I lost track of that, I couldn't direct the same way. I couldn't be a director for-hire; it's just not my nature.

I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

We all have idealism. We think we're healthy and then, all of a sudden, one day, you have cancer. The truth has a mind of its own.

I'm a history person; I love history. But I am conditioned by the present.

I am a storyteller, and I do love ideas.

I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can.

One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.