Stanley Kubrick

The greatest victory is to conquer yourself.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

I'm not interested in making films that are purely entertainment. I want to make films that make people think.

The biggest lie in the world is that you can't do something.

I don't like to talk about my films. I like to let them speak for themselves.

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.

I think the key to life is to be able to enjoy the little things.

The very meaninglessness of life forces a man to create his own meaning.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.

Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.

Perhaps 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.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form: they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.

To be honest, the end of the book [The Shining] seemed a bit hackneyed to me and not very interesting.

The novel (The Shining) is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is all that really matters.

No. To see a film once and write a review is an absurdity. Yet very few critics ever see a film twice or write about films from a leisurely, thoughtful perspective.

The idea that social restraints are all bad is based on a utopian and unrealistic vision of man.

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'... Everything we know about the universe reveals that there is no god. I chose to do Dr. Arthur C. Clarke's story as a film because it highlights a critical factor necessary for human evolution; that is, beyond our present condition. This film is a rejection of the notion that there is a god; isn't that obvious?