Top 40 George A. Romero Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

— George A. Romero

Featured in: Famous Movie Quotes

2. “I’m like my zombies. I won’t stay dead!”

— George A. Romero

3. “Collaborate, don’t dictate.”

— George A. Romero

4. “I’ve always felt that the real horror is next door to us, that the scariest monsters are our neighbors.”

— George A. Romero

5. “My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I’m not a student of the genre. I don’t care what anybody else does.”

— George A. Romero

6. “Movies are about escape.”

— George A. Romero

7. “As a filmmaker, I love the medium. I have a great affection for it and I’ve been lucky enough to do all different kinds of films. The greatest part of the success I’ve had comes from horror. I love the idea of mixing humor and horror and to me, it’s all a giggle.”

— George A. Romero

8. “I also have always liked the monster within idea. I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.”

— George A. Romero

9. “Collaborate, don’t dictate. Every department head has something to offer. Listen and gratefully accept their offerings. They’re moviemakers, too.”

— George A. Romero

10. “Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.”

— George A. Romero

11. “Zombies are the real lower-class citizens of the monster world and that’s why l like them.”

— George A. Romero

12. “Nothings ever real until its real.”

— George A. Romero

13. “Just because I’m showing somebody being disemboweled doesn’t mean that I have to get heavy and put a message behind it.”

— George A. Romero

14. “Zombies are always moving fast in video games. It makes sense if you think about it. Those games are all about hand-eye coordination and how quickly can you get them before they get you.”

— George A. Romero

15. “As a filmmaker you get typecast just as much as an actor does, so I’m trapped in a genre that I love, but I’m trapped in it!”

— George A. Romero

16. “I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next.”

— George A. Romero

17. “Everybody knows the rules, even though some break those rules.”

— George A. Romero

18. “People called ‘28 Days’ and ‘28 Weeks’ zombie movies, and they’re not! It’s some sort of virus; they’re not dead.”

— George A. Romero

19. “I expect a zombie to show up on ‘Sesame Street’ soon, teaching kids to count.”

— George A. Romero

20. “A zombie film is not fun without a bunch of stupid people running around and observing how they fail to handle the situation.”

— George A. Romero

21. “It would be very hard to write a serious drama and say some of these things. You can be much more abstract and allusive with horror, and it’s very forgiving to the author. You don’t necessarily have to take an absolutely positive position. You can just write whatever.”

— George A. Romero

22. “I go to conventions and universities and talk to young filmmakers and everybody’s making a zombie movie! It’s because it’s easy to get the neighbors to come out, put some ketchup on them.”

— George A. Romero

23. “The most realistic blood I’ve seen is when Marlon Brando gets beat up in On The Waterfront.”

— George A. Romero

24. “If one horror film hits, everyone says, ‘Let’s go make a horror film.’ It’s the genre that never dies.”

— George A. Romero

25. “For a Catholic kid in parochial school, the only way to survive the beatings – by classmates, not the nuns – was to be the funny guy.”

— George A. Romero

26. “I’ve gotten letters, but mostly from Bible-belt types who say, you must be Satan! They come right out and call me Satan and hope that I’m damned to hell.”

— George A. Romero

27. “I’ll never get sick of zombies. I just get sick of producers.”

— George A. Romero

28. “My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.”

— George A. Romero

29. “When I was old enough to go to movies alone, I got to see ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Dracula’ on the big screen. I just fell in love with them.”

— George A. Romero

30. “Anybody who tunes into Rush Limabaugh already knows what he’s going to say and is already inclined to agree. So it winds up creating tribes.”

— George A. Romero

31. “I like guys who are understandable and good guys who are flawed.”

— George A. Romero

32. “I don’t want a zombie society. I don’t want to go that far.”

— George A. Romero

33. “If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.”

— George A. Romero

34. “I don’t think you need to spend $40 million to be creepy. The best horror films are the ones that are much less endowed.”

— George A. Romero

35. “You can fall on your face easily if you go off in a certain direction. The Birds is a good example, some people are really phobic about birds flying over their heads, and some don’t care. So, it’s a personal thing.”

— George A. Romero

36. “As great as Ed is, the wisdom out here is that he can’t carry a movie. They’ll pay him $3 million to be the second banana in Julia Roberts things. But they won’t put up $3 million for an Ed Harris movie.”

— George A. Romero

37. “I think you’re only free if you’re working on very low or huge money.”

— George A. Romero

38. “I grew up on DC Comics, moral tales where the bad guys got their comeuppance. To me the gory panels or grotesque stuff just made me chuckle.”

— George A. Romero

39. “I can’t really make fun of zombies. They’re not liars. They’re not cheats.”

— George A. Romero

40. “I really believe that you could do horror very inexpensively. I don’t think it has anything to do with the effects, the effects are not the most important parts.”

— George A. Romero

41. “I keep a little notebook of things that I can do to the zombies that might be silly and fun.”

— George A. Romero

42. “My zombies will never take over the world because I need the humans. The humans are the ones I dislike the most, and they’re where the trouble really lies.”

— George A. Romero

43. “There are so many factors when you think of your own films. You think of the people you worked on it with, and somehow forget the movie. You can’t forgive the movie for a long time. It takes a few years to look at it with any objectivity and forgive its flaws.”

— George A. Romero

44. “My opinion of a good zombie walk is to loll your head as if it’s a little too heavy and the muscles have begun to atrophy.”

— George A. Romero

45. “Tragicomic absurdity from Disney World, as the pack of Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan fell upon children, each red bite a boutonniere.”

— George A. Romero

46. “In the dark days to come, some former Congress members would wonder, if they’d only listened closer, if they might have heard America’s tendons pinging apart like snapped piano wire and been able to do something to heal the wounds before the whole body politic had been ripped apart.”

— George A. Romero