Quentin Tarantino Quotes & Sayings

My parents said, Oh, he's going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor. — Quentin Tarantino

I've always thought my soundtracks do pretty good, because they're basically professional equivalents of a mix tape I'd make for you at home. — Quentin Tarantino

Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them. — Quentin Tarantino

Do i look like a beautiful blond with big tits and an ass that tastes like French vanilla ice-cream?
No. no, you don't.
Then why are you telling me all this bullshit just so you can fuck me. — Quentin Tarantino

If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down. — Quentin Tarantino

I felt no obligation to bow to any 21st Century political correctness. What I did feel an obligation to do was to take the 21stCentury viewers and physically transport them back to the ante bellum South in 1858, in Mississippi, and have them look at America for what it was back then. And I wanted it to be shocking. — Quentin Tarantino

I hate The Confederate cause. I've always felt that they are our Nazis and the rebel flag was our swastika. — Quentin Tarantino

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts. — Quentin Tarantino

In polite society, there is such a thing as sensitivity to some issues, as time has gone on. There was a time when we weren't politically correct, at all, and we all wince at moments when we look to the past and see that. I don't really know what the answer is, as far as that is concerned. However, me, as an artist, I don't really think about it, at all. It actually is not my job to think about that, especially in terms of me, as a writer, but also as a filmmaker. I'm not worried about the filmmaking part because, if I'm writing it, that's what I'm going to do. — Quentin Tarantino

I appreciate the female foot, but I've never said that I have a foot fetish. But I am a lower track guy. I like legs' I like booties'. I have a black male sexuality. — Quentin Tarantino

You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it. — Quentin Tarantino

I like a much more Japanese style of blood, where it's red and it almost has a paint kind of quality to it. You can put it on metal, and it has this vividness. Because, normally, what they use in Hollywood is this stuff that looks like strawberry pancake syrup or raspberry pancake syrup. — Quentin Tarantino

I don't feel any 'white guilt,' because I had nothing to do with (slavery) whatsoever. I feel shame for my country that it happened and that's why I feel we need to deal with it. — Quentin Tarantino

But the truth of the matter is, that was fairly, fairly early on in Goebbels' 800 movies that he made in Germany. The majority of them, especially once the war got going, you hardly saw Nazi officers in it at all. They were mostly musicals and comedies and melodramas and stories of great German men from the past. — Quentin Tarantino

Well, it's funny because, "The Green Leaves of Summer" and "The Alamo" theme are the same thing. There's just - the Brothers Four was a different recording of it. — Quentin Tarantino

Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life. — Quentin Tarantino

I cut the scene out, but there was a moment where Christoph Waltz plays the piano in 'Django [Unchained]' - Jamie [Foxx] is a magnificent piano-player but there's never a moment where Django plays the piano. — Quentin Tarantino

When I make a film, I am hoping to reinvent the genre a little bit. I just do it my way. I make my own little Quentin versions of them ... I consider myself a student of cinema. It's almost like I am going for my professorship in cinema, and the day I die is the day I graduate. It is a lifelong study. — Quentin Tarantino

I hate school at that time. Now, little did I know that actually if I had stayed in school I would've actually really liked college. I wasn't aware enough to know that the junior high I was suffering through would be school at its worst. — Quentin Tarantino

I always thought it was a B.S. thing that they didn't show it [scalping] in other Westerns, but especially if you're going to really go with the idea that we're desecrating the bodies, and the idea is to strike fear in the hearts of other German soldiers, then we had to see what they're talking about. — Quentin Tarantino

I was just this video-store guy and now I was actually making movies and stuff. — Quentin Tarantino

Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece. — Quentin Tarantino

I laugh all the time. I'm an easy laugher. You can find me on any set, because I'm always laughing. — Quentin Tarantino

I'm definitely not on Twitter. I do have a Facebook page and Facebook friends. It's a lot of fun, especially if you don't just start friending people you don't know. — Quentin Tarantino

The good ideas will survive. — Quentin Tarantino

I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away. — Quentin Tarantino

Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it. — Quentin Tarantino

If you want to make a movie, make it. Don't wait for a grant, don't wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it. — Quentin Tarantino

Oh gosh, well, you know, growing up in the '70s being a young boy there, you know, there were still exploitation movies, where, you know, were, you know, still opened up every week and, you know, played - sometimes they would play it at the local, you know, mall theater. — Quentin Tarantino

The other thing is even the Jews in the course - even though metaphorically aligning themselves with Indians, and, you know, you have genocide aligning itself with another genocide. — Quentin Tarantino

One of the privileges you have of living the life of an artist and creating your own world and everything is the fact that, in-between times, you can kind of spend them however you want. Because, you know, once you open up your candy store again, you're open for business. And you have to be responsible. You have to be available. — Quentin Tarantino

I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience. — Quentin Tarantino

If it's too much for people, if audiences don't accept it, well I guess that's just the way it is. I'm not being cavalier when it comes to my financial partners, but I think I've earned the right to do my thing my way. While I really want it to do well and it would be lovely if it's popular, movies are for a long time. I'm really proud of the piece. If it ends up not connecting with audiences, I won't be heartbroken. I'll be a little disappointed, but I won't be heartbroken. — Quentin Tarantino

I mean, there's an aspect I've always said that is - it's, you know, it's not poetry but it's kind of like it. It's not song lyrics but it's kind of like song lyrics. It's not rap but it's kind of like rap. And it's not stand-up comedy but it is kind of like stand-up comedy. It's all those things together. — Quentin Tarantino

I actually thought that the idea of doing a World War II movie in the guise of a spaghetti western would just be an interesting way to tackle it. Just even the way that the spaghetti westerns tackled the history of the Old West, I thought it could be a neat thing to do that with World War II, but just as opposed to using cowboy iconography, using World War II iconography as kind of the jumping-off point. — Quentin Tarantino

I dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play. — Quentin Tarantino

What I would do is I would just remember the scene and I'd go home and I'd write out the scene from memory. And anything I didn't remember I would just fill in the blanks myself and then go and give it to a classmate and then we'd do it. — Quentin Tarantino

I look at 'Death Proof' and realize I had too much time. — Quentin Tarantino

Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn't mean I'm anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people. — Quentin Tarantino

I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page. — Quentin Tarantino

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.' — Quentin Tarantino

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film. — Quentin Tarantino

One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed. — Quentin Tarantino

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it. — Quentin Tarantino

My mom took me to see Carnal Knowledge and The Wild Bunch and all these kind of movies when I was a kid. — Quentin Tarantino

It's very important that every movie I do makes money because I want the people that had the faith in me to get their money back. — Quentin Tarantino

Apache have the strongest nation in the world behind them. So we're going to inflict pain where our European aunts and uncles had to endure it. And so the fact that you could actually get Nazis scared of a band of Jews, that's - again, that's a gigantic psychological thing. — Quentin Tarantino

I'm a historian in my own mind. — Quentin Tarantino

One thing I don't understand is that average American movie-goers cannot watch a movie for three hours, yet they'll watch a stupid, boring, horrific football game for four hours. Now, that is boredom at its most colossal. — Quentin Tarantino

I want to have the fun of doing anime and I love anime, but I can't do storyboards because I can't really draw and that's what they live and die on. — Quentin Tarantino

The film [Django] really has a lot of ups and downs, and taps into a lot of different emotions. To me, the trick was balancing all those emotions, so that I could get you where I wanted you to be by the very end. I wanted the audience cheering in triumph at the end. — Quentin Tarantino

I see characters lying all the time in a lot of Hollywood movies. They can't do this because it would affect the movie this way or that or this demographic might not like it. To me a character can't do anything good or bad, they can only do something that's true or not. — Quentin Tarantino

Jules Winnfield: "ENGLISH, MOTHER FUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT!?"

Samuel L. Jackson — Quentin Tarantino

I remember, like, literally saying - watching some cowboy-and-Indian movie with my mother, and I go, so, if we were back then, we'd be the Indians, right? She goes, yup, that's who we'd be. We wouldn't be those guys in the covered wagons. We'd be the Indians. — Quentin Tarantino

I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards - in the life of an artist. — Quentin Tarantino

I surprised myself, that I was in the tissue of the character enough, that I could actually come up with something that I didn't actually feel or didn't believe. — Quentin Tarantino

But the idea of using the Apache resistance, one, it works effective to actually get German soldiers to think of Jews that way. You know, and they're not just any Jews. They're the American Jews. They're Jews with entitlement. — Quentin Tarantino

I just don't feel the whole white guilt and pussy-footing around race issues. I'm completely above all that. I've never worried about what anyone might think of me 'cause I've always believed that the true of heart recognize the true of heart. — Quentin Tarantino

I shot the way I wanted to shoot [in The Hateful Eight]. The only real disadvantage I felt at the time, but I don't feel now, was that we weren't able to get a zoom lens, and I had really gotten used to using a zoom lens for that little zoom creep. But it was also a nice thing to be forced to not use all the tools that you've gotten used to, from time to time, and to be able to work in a different way. — Quentin Tarantino

I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre. — Quentin Tarantino

Most, actually, German actors have like some speaking of French. So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency. — Quentin Tarantino

I always wanted to do a movie that deals with America's horrific past with slavery, but the way I wanted to deal with it is - as opposed to doing it as a huge historical movie with a capital H - I thought it could be better if it was wrapped up in genre. — Quentin Tarantino

Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making. — Quentin Tarantino

For those regarded as warriors ...
When engaged in combat, the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior's only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion. Kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be Lord God or Buddha himself. This truth lies at the heart of the art of combat. — Quentin Tarantino

I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you're not that good. You just reached the level here. I don't ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate. — Quentin Tarantino

I was writing a film criticism book on Sergio Corbucci, the director who did the original Django. So, I was kind of getting immersed in his world. Towards the end of the Inglourious Basterds press tour I was in Japan. Spaghetti Westerns are really popular there, so I picked up a bunch of soundtracks and spent my day off listening to all these scores. And all of a sudden the opening scene [Django] just came to me. — Quentin Tarantino

Truth be told, actually, my favorite director of the Movie Brats was not Scorsese. Loved him. But my favorite director of the Movie Brats was Brian de Palma. I actually met De Palma right after I'd done 'Reservoir Dogs,' and I was very beside myself. — Quentin Tarantino

I don't believe in putting in music as a band aid to get you over some rough parts or bad film making. If it's there it's got to add to it or take it to another level. — Quentin Tarantino

I like my song-sequences in my movies, but one of the things I like about them, is I get in and I get out. — Quentin Tarantino

My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I'll be manager. Ill be the crazy old movie guy. — Quentin Tarantino

What if a kid goes to school after seeing Kill Bill and starts slicing up other kids? You know, I'll take that chance! Violent films don't turn children into violent people. They may turn them into violent filmmakers but that's another matter altogether. — Quentin Tarantino

Everybody always talks about the science fiction genre, in particular, which always makes me think about people in spaceships. I can appreciate that, but that's not really where I think my dramatist aspect lies. — Quentin Tarantino

All my movies are achingly personal. — Quentin Tarantino

I don't want to be an old-man filmmaker, making old-man movies, and I don't want to be the one not to know when to leave the party. — Quentin Tarantino

You're not going to have the police force representing the black and brown community, if they've spent the last 30 years busting every son and daughter and father and mother for every piddling drug offense that they've ever done, thus creating a mistrust in the community. But at the same time, you should be able to talk about abuses of power, and you should be able to talk about police brutality and what, in some cases, is as far as I'm concerned, outright murder and outright loss of justice without the police organization targeting you in the way that they have done me. — Quentin Tarantino

If you were a U.S. Cavalry guy and you thought you were going to be captured by the Apaches, you might kill yourself. If they were with their wives and they thought they were going to be captured, they would shoot their wives for fear of the Apaches getting them. — Quentin Tarantino

I've always been passionate about these different (film) genres. Kung fu movies, samurai movies, Japanese movies, all this kind of stuff, and my love for it, and just trying to present it in a way that other people can love it as much as I do. — Quentin Tarantino

Suddenly, Westerns, which were our action films and what the working man went to see to blow off steam and have a good time, became boring to most people growing up from the Eighties on, because they're kind of pastoral. — Quentin Tarantino

Oddly enough, it's - most of the books written about the subject aren't very good because they just focus in on the more hateful movies that they did very early, early on when they were trying to, you know, get Germany into the war, whether it be anti-Semitic movies like "Jud Suss," or "The Eternal Jew," or movies made against the Polish to help, you know, create sympathy for them to invade Poland - you know, there'd be movies where there would be some German girl living in Poland who's raped by the Polish or something. — Quentin Tarantino

You can do all these kinds of things that are up close and personal, but you really have to bring your strength, and really - you have to really be committed to actually strangle the life out of somebody, to crush their larynx and just squeeze every drop of life out of them. — Quentin Tarantino

A thing when I was writing the movie [The hateful eight] was, I hate The Confederate cause. I've always felt that they are our Nazis and the rebel flag was our swastika. So I totally have no love for that whole romance for that Antebellum time period. — Quentin Tarantino

If you're a film fan, collecting video is sort of like marijuana. Laser discs, they're definitely cocaine. Film prints are heroin, all right? You're shooting smack when you start collecting film prints. So, I kinda got into it in a big way, and I've got a pretty nice collection I'm real proud of. — Quentin Tarantino

Trying to make a feature film yourself with no money is the best film school you can do. — Quentin Tarantino

Critics don't want to see directors they like make too much of a left turn. That's good for criticism. — Quentin Tarantino

I actually want to do a theatrical adaptation of 'Hateful Eight' because I actually like the idea of other actors having a chance to play my characters and see what happens from that. — Quentin Tarantino

It's nice to get invited to the parties and to be able to hobnob and celebrate a job well done with your colleagues. — Quentin Tarantino

I will never do 'Pulp Fiction 2,' but having said that, I could very well do other movies with these characters. — Quentin Tarantino

I didn't want my script to get too out of control like that. So I actually made it a point not to do stuff like that, to pretty - to keep it more sparse than it's been in the last few years, or the last decade. — Quentin Tarantino

"Dukes of Hazzard" or something you could, you know, that your work is going to be made up of that - episodic television shows. Not that I got many of them, but that was where I, but actually oddly enough though, they were teaching camera terminology at the same time in this acting class so I actually was able to understand what rack focus and whip pan and all that stuff meant. — Quentin Tarantino

If I wasn't a film-maker, I'd be a film critic. It's the only thing I'd be qualified to do. — Quentin Tarantino

If the film isn't suspenseful, i.e. the pressure cooker situation of what's going on in the movie, if that's not part of it, if the threat of violence and the temperature isn't always going up a notch every scene or so, then the movie is going to be boring. It's not going to work. — Quentin Tarantino

Violence in real life is terrible; violence in movies can be cool. It's just another colour to work with. — Quentin Tarantino

I remember when it was reported that I was going to do the film in this format, people were actually speculating, and I guess I understand it. They were like, "Yeah, okay, that all sounds really great, but why would he do it for a thing that's so set bound?" That's not very profound thinking when it comes to 65mm. It's not just for shooting travelogues, mountain scenery and nature. — Quentin Tarantino

You're an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I've always had is I've always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I go, hey I'd like to do that in class this Wednesday. — Quentin Tarantino

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been. — Quentin Tarantino

Batman is not a very interesting character. For any actor. There is simply not much to play. I think Michael Keaton did it the best, and I wish good luck to Ben Affleck. But, you know who would have made a great Batman? Alec Baldwin in the '80s. — Quentin Tarantino

Leni Riefenstahl was the one person Goebbels had no control over in the filmmaking community of Nazi Germany, and they despised each other. But because she was Hitler's favorite, she could do what she wanted. She was the only filmmaker that did not have to cow down to Joseph Goebbels. — Quentin Tarantino

I'm probably only going to make 10 movies, so I'm already planning on what I'm going to do after that. That's why I'm counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre. — Quentin Tarantino

I want to have more original-screenplay Oscars than anybody who's ever lived! So much, I want to have so many that - four is enough. And do it within ten films, all right, so that when I die, they rename the original-screenplay Oscar 'the Quentin.' And everybody's down with that. — Quentin Tarantino

I do feel that I need to do at least one more Western - I think you need to make three Westerns to call yourself a Western director. — Quentin Tarantino