Best Movie Reference Quotes & Sayings

This is the part in the movie where that guy says, "Zombies? What zombies?" just before they eat his brains. I don't want to be that guy. — Holly Black

I decided that a movie marathon was clearly in order. I tried to narrow down the options. Anything romantic was definitely out, as was anything involving space travel, kings, or handsome princes. Preferably there should be no good-looking men whatsoever, lest they remind me of Aeron. Sadly, that eliminated practically everything. — M.A. George

Okay. I picked up a movie to watch tonight. You can watch it with me if you like. It's a chick movie. Merri Lee said that means girls like it, not that there are small birds in it. — Anne Bishop

Someday, I'll gain telepathic powers like every other regular movie ghost and I will go all Freddie Krueger on his bony, little, rat arse!"
I rolled my eyes, but kept marching down the street.
"Then I'd have to go all Ghostbusters on yours.", I tried to keep my voice low to keep from drawing attention to myself.
"No, you wouldn't. You love my arse, darling!", he walked backwards few feet in front of me.
His big smile was enough to make me grin and roll my eyes again at him. — Tia Artemis

After returning from his stint in the minors made reference to the movie Slapshot with: I'm happy to be back. It was never my aspiration as a kid to play in the Federal league. — Glenn Healy

Maybe I can climb one of those," Simon said, eyeing the fat white pillars that held up the slanted roof of the Hall. Runes were carved on them in overlapping patterns, but otherwise there were no visible handholds. "Work off steam that way."
"Oh, come on," Clary said. "You're a vampire, not Spider-Man."
Simon's only response was to jog lightly up the steps to the base of a pillar. He eyed it thoughtfully for a moment before putting his hands to it and starting to climb. Clary watched him, open-mouthed, as his fingertips and feet found impossible holds on the ridged stone. "You are Spider-Man!" she exclaimed. — Cassandra Clare

I think he's handling it with grace. A lot of teenage boys would sulk, or lurk around under your window with a boom box. — Cassandra Clare

After that, a strange thing happened: Amy couldn't stop her expectations from rising. She imagined herself transformed and beautiful, like Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, with her homemade dress and mysterious lace boots. She pictured her hair in an upsweep of loose curls. In the fantasy, her prom face looked like the one she only wore asleep, loose and relaxed. She imagined a photographer asking her to smile and, for the first time in her life, being able to do it. — Cammie McGovern

Is that a scanning electron microscope? "This'll do, pig, this'll do," I murmur.
"Excuse me?"
"Sorry. Film reference, wasn't meant as an insult."
"Ah. I see." His tone tells me he clearly doesn't. I briefly consider educating him, but explaining a movie
about a talking pig who wants to be a sheepdog to a Japanese vampire just isn't all that high on my to-do
list. — D.D. Barant

Genres give a vocabulary. They give a frame of reference for the audience to enter into a movie. Then, once they have their footing, that's when you can start doing things that they don't expect. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Regin slapped her knees. "Oh, my gods, look at him running like his life depended on catching us." She slid open the door. "Is this straight outta Platoon, or what? Willem!" she cried, holding out one hand. "Run, Willem!" Then she choked on her laughter. — Kresley Cole

If you watch the first [Star Wars] movie, you don't actually know exactly what the Empire is trying to do. They're going to rule by fear
but you don't know what their endgame is. You don't know what Leia is princess of. You don't yet understand who Jabba the Hutt is, even though there is a reference to him. You don't know that Vader is Luke's father, Leia is his sister
but the possibility is all there. The beauty of that movie was that it was an unfamiliar world, and yet you wanted to see it expand and to see where it went. — J.J. Abrams

I'm horrible at quoting movies! Even my very favorites are not easily recalled or programmed to memory. When people start movie quoting around me, I'm that person who just smiles and then looks up the reference later. — Ashley Rickards

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. — Gillian Flynn

Have you never seen a movie? Read a comic book? That's always how it starts - just a little temptation, just a little taste of evil, and then BAM, your light saber turns red and you're breathing through a big black mask and slicing off your son's hand just to be mean.
They looked at him blankly. — Cassandra Clare

Ay-firmative,' Eve said, and tried for a smile. 'Sorry. An Aliens reference always makes me feel better at times like this. Exept I'm not sure I'm the one who lives through the movie. — Rachel Caine

Zombieland reference," Jon said, nodding.
"How do you know that? That's a thousand-year-old reference!" I looked at laura. "I can't think of a single movie from a thousand years ago."
"Uh ... Betsy ... "
"Don't say it." You know how you don't know how stupid something is until you hear yourself say it? That happened to me a lot. — MaryJanice Davidson

[The public intellectual] will also describe how she can work a pop culture reference into her essay, comparing the Supreme Court to the creature in the number-one box office movie of the moment. Editors like this sort of mass-media integration, first, because it gives them a way to illustrate the piece, and second because they are under the delusion that pop-culture references will propel a piece's readership into the five-digit area. — David Brooks

I don't believe in doing thousands of cuts, then giving it to the editor to make the movie. 'Dump-truck directing' is my reference to that style of moviemaking. You have to know how to cut before you can shoot well. The lack of definition in movies today is appalling. Very few people know how to mount a narrative anymore. If a scene works in one cut, you don't need 10. Or it might need 10. Let's not make it 20. — Gordon Willis

In almost every book I've written, there is a reference to a movie - legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen. — Denise Duhamel

Who-who are you?" Seth asked, hesitantly."Wh-what do you want?" How else was was I supposed to reply? The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.I mean, I'd only seen the movie like seventeen times.
"I'm Luke Skywalker," I said. "I'm here to rescue you. — Meg Cabot

I eyed him. "Are you really Jamaican?"
He returned my gaze evenly. "Why do you think I'm not, sistah?"
"I don't know," I said. "I have to admit, pretty much everything I know about Jamaica comes from watching Cool Runnings, and I'm guessing a Disney movie about Olympic bobsledders isn't the most accurate reference material. — Jacqueline Carey

I'm never aiming to make a movie like someone else's movie, but in order to describe a movie to someone else who hasn't seen it, you usually have to reference things they have seen. — Rob Zombie

Oh God, is this like Silence of the Lambs?" Tears flowed down her face. "I don't want to go down the hole! I won't put lotion on the skin! Look at me, you won't be able to wear my skin, I won't cover your huge ass!" She wailed. — Alanea Alder

So there was no explicit bonding. Certainly not the kind you might be expecting if you like films like The Parent Trap as much as Mizuko and I did. We watched it together once, and I dared to say that we were like two little Lindsay Lohans in the isolation cabin, to which she made a kind of grunt. — Olivia Sudjic

It's weird when one movie that's connected to another doesn't reference that movie at all. — Robert Downey Jr.

Watch a good movie sometime without reference to what's happening but only with attention to how it was photographed; you'll see the change of focus - zoom in, pan out, close-up on face, fade to black, open from above - easily. You want to do that in what you write; it's one of the things that keep people's eyes on the page, though they're almost never conscious of it. — Diana Gabaldon

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights. — Lawrence Lessig

In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not one single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come from, these vortices of flame, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69) ... For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car ... It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. — Umberto Eco

A lot of people in the movie business don't have a point of reference for me; nobody really knows who I am. — Andre Holland

She sees ghosts," said Samuel, impatient with my whining.
"I see dead people," I deadpanned back. Oddly, it was Uncle Mike who laughed. I hadn't thought he'd be a moviegoer. — Patricia Briggs