Either you care, or you don’t. There’s no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.
I’ve never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I’m a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.
Everything has already been done. Every story has been told. Every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it one better.
I haven’t had one sexual thought since the court martial.
It’s a mistake to confuse pity with love.
It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.
I didn’t want murder. It’s all gone wrong.
My reputation has grown slowly.
How does anybody ever think of anything?
Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.
I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, Mr. President, but I do say not more than ten to twenty million dead depending upon the breaks.
What do you take me for? A fourteen karat sucker?
The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive.
The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, ‘2001’ shows that what some people call ‘god’ is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don’t understand, they call ‘god’ -Stanley Kubrick, interview, 1963.
Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good and it trains you to think objectively when you’re in trouble.
Take a stress pill and think things over – HAL in 2001.
There’s something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.
If Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda had a baby, it would be Matthew Modine.
Nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing.
The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.