My period as a young teenager when you really listen to music so you can get understand a little bit more about what the music is was, say, 1965 to 1968. I was just lucky to be in those times.
Stanley KubrickThe very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.
Stanley KubrickI will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthromorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe.
Stanley KubrickGod has a hard-on for a Marine because we kill everything we see. He plays His game, we play ours.
Stanley KubrickThe feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.
Stanley KubrickAnyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
Stanley KubrickPerhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.
Stanley KubrickRegret isn't going to get me anywhere. It's like being obsessed with something. It doesn't bring you anywhere.
Stanley KubrickThe hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that's going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie.
Stanley KubrickThe destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours.
Stanley KubrickA satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be.
Stanley KubrickIt's impossible to tell you what I'm going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.
Stanley KubrickBe suspicious of people who have, or crave, power. Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.
Stanley KubrickIn any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.
Stanley KubrickYou sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
Stanley KubrickNo philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.
Stanley KubrickThere's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.
Stanley KubrickIf you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
Stanley KubrickI’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.
Stanley KubrickThe screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.
Stanley KubrickOne man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.
Stanley KubrickYou have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity--no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.
Stanley KubrickKnow what it is the emotional statement to convey, and use taste and judgement to help the actors give their best possible performance.
Stanley KubrickCritical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion.
Stanley KubrickIf man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?
Stanley KubrickThe world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
Stanley KubrickThere are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.
Stanley KubrickEither you care, or you don't. There's no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.
Stanley Kubrick