If at age 10 I say there are monsters in the basement and they don't believe it, I would have stayed in that house. My father would have said "Shut up and get to your room." So I thought the only sanctioned tyranny in the world is parenthood and everybody goes "Yeah." It's a dictatorship - parenthood.

There's something worse than not making a movie. It's doing it for the wrong reasons. Then you end up putting three, four, five years of your life into it and you come out with a thing that you're not proud of.

When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.

I love monsters. If I go to a church, I'm more interested in the gargoyles than the saints. I really don't care much about the idea of normal - that's very abstract to me. I think that perfection is practically unattainable but imperfection is right at hand. So that's why I love monsters: because they represent a side of us we should actually embrace and celebrate.

I love REAL set construction and think that sets are very important part of the storytelling and scope of a film.

America is old tobacco: gold and green. It's lush and literally feels like wealth, like optimism, turn of the century America where everything was blooming.

Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined