Top 100 Eli Roth Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’ve realized that I can’t multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.”

— Eli Roth

52. “I look at careers like Ben Stiller and think that’s a great career to have where you’re doing movies that you write and direct, and also act in films, although he’s primarily an actor.”

— Eli Roth

53. “You know, I’m from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand.”

— Eli Roth

54. “It’s very flattering to feel like you actually helped create a sub-genre.”

— Eli Roth

55. “I’ve always wanted to make a big apocalypse movie. I love 28 Weeks Later, I think it’s great but Cell is totally different. It’s about people’s dependence on technology, the collapse of society and watching everything fall apart. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do, which I believe it can!”

— Eli Roth

56. “I saw ‘Alien’ when I was 8 years old. To me, it was like a combination of Jaws and Star Wars, and that’s the movie that made me want to be a director.”

— Eli Roth

57. “In musical theater, if you have a song, it has to advance the plot. If you have a song in a musical and it does not advance the plot, it gets dropped.”

— Eli Roth

58. “The one negative to horror is that it’s always law of diminishing returns. When you go in the funhouse, the ride is never scary the second time. You will never have that pure experience as when you first watch it.”

— Eli Roth

59. “Imagine trying to relive your worst break-up, your worst fight, the most painful death of a loved one, and just really relive it step by step, and bring it up and apply it to the scene you’re in.”

— Eli Roth

60. “I feel like in the ’90s, horror just lost its way and everything became so safe and watered-down.”

— Eli Roth

61. “I have the infinite galaxy from ’2001 as my screensaver – so if I space out while I’m writing and it goes to screensaver, I can just stare off into the stars.”

— Eli Roth

62. “Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or and people said: “Wait a minute, he’s actually smart and he knows what he’s doing!” I feel that with Hostel, any time you make a film like that it’s going to illicit a strong reaction and you can’t worry about that.”

— Eli Roth

63. “I have a strong art-history background.”

— Eli Roth

64. “Movie stars need to retain some of that mystique if you are a big movie star.”

— Eli Roth

65. “You do need an outlet to release all of those fears. You build it up and then, when you go to a movie theater, it’s the last place that it’s socially acceptable to be terrified. It’s saying that, for the next 90 minutes, you’re allowed to be afraid and you’re not a coward for feeling that way.”

— Eli Roth

66. “I’ve always been a fan of 3D, going back to movies in the ’50s. I was part of the early ’80s 3D craze, which was coming at you in Jaws 3D, so I’ve always wanted to make a 3D film.”

— Eli Roth

67. “Borat shows American stereotypes of Eastern Europe but it’s an accurate depiction of what a certain type of American is. They think they can buy and sell these girls and then they get bought and sold.”

— Eli Roth

68. “When I go see an R-rated horror movie, I want lots of violence.”

— Eli Roth

69. “The best movies now are called ‘thrillers.’ Because if you use the word ‘horror,’ people’s associations are straight-to-video crap.”

— Eli Roth

70. “I hear what people say, I read all the reviews, all the blogs, and I am always curious to hear it, because you can’t always listen to the good press, you have to hear the bad press, too.”

— Eli Roth

71. “I love movies. I mean, I really, really love movies.”

— Eli Roth

72. “I need to eliminate ‘like’ from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, ‘That’s seriously like ’ I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.”

— Eli Roth

73. “When people direct insults at me, I can take it.”

— Eli Roth

74. “I’ve always wanted to be involved in an exorcism movie. But I thought, “How do you make something scarier than The Exorcist?” The answer is you don’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make something that is original and interesting.”

— Eli Roth

75. “If someone gets up and walks out of the movie, it means it’s really affected them.”

— Eli Roth

76. “I love historical movies. I want to make a violent medieval epic.”

— Eli Roth

77. “Horror audiences don’t need to see some TV actor they’re familiar with.”

— Eli Roth

78. “I get a little too obsessive with work.”

— Eli Roth

79. “Anytime you’re the first to speak out against something, there’s going to be a backlash.”

— Eli Roth

80. “I’d love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they’d get so violent that people would get bored of it.”

— Eli Roth

81. “A comedy can actually get funnier and funnier. Even though you know the joke, you enjoy it so much, it’s the facial expression, you laugh. The laugh doesn’t wear off. It could be with you for thirty years.”

— Eli Roth

82. “Quentin Tarantino faced the same backlash when his films came out until eventually people felt they were actually much smarter.”

— Eli Roth

83. “Life is a series of avoiding horrible situations until ultimately you’re dead. That’s how I feel about things.”

— Eli Roth

84. “Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.”

— Eli Roth

85. “People want to be disturbed when they go see a horror movie.”

— Eli Roth

86. “It’s just assumed that a horror sequel is going to be bad. It’s never going to be as good as the first one.”

— Eli Roth

87. “I knew how to act and had studied acting and enjoyed it, but I’d never pushed myself to really perform as an actor, and create a role, and have the whole character’s backstory.”

— Eli Roth

88. “When you’re making a television show, it’s about the story and arc of the show rather than any particular episode or director.”

— Eli Roth

89. “I think you should make movies as long as the story dictates.”

— Eli Roth

90. “Once I got over the fear of writing female characters, it actually came quite easily and I was really happy with it. I just thought about girls I knew really, really well and I’d just have conversations with them and tried to relay how they talk about certain things.”

— Eli Roth

91. “For the fee of $10,000, anyone could be escorted to a room, handed a loaded gun and offered another human to kill. The concept made me nauseous. But it also felt real, and rang bells with my more cynical side.”

— Eli Roth

92. “Everybody has to know where they’re coming from, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, who they are. These are essentials.”

— Eli Roth

93. “As a kid, my idols were Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and I get into crazy races with myself. Raimi was 21 when he made movies, and when I didn’t get ‘Cabin Fever’ made that fast I thought I’d failed.”

— Eli Roth

94. “You know, the best thing you can say about a horror film is, ‘Don’t see it.’”

— Eli Roth

95. “I felt people responded to two things. One, obviously, is the gore and the scenes like the eye gauging.”

— Eli Roth

96. “I think horror should never be safe, whether it’s violent or non violent.”

— Eli Roth

97. “What is important to me is that people know I respect the business of making movies.”

— Eli Roth

98. “I never put out a vanilla edition of a DVD.”

— Eli Roth

99. “I’ve always dreamed of having a year-round haunted house.”

— Eli Roth

100. “I want to have an ending where people say: “That’s the most shocking ending I’ve ever seen in a mainstream horror film.””

— Eli Roth