Top 200 Guillermo del Toro Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You have to believe the magic to see it.”

— Guillermo del Toro

2. “The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.”

— Guillermo del Toro

3. “What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don’t think so. It’s the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.”

— Guillermo del Toro

4. “You deserve better than this. You deserve people who value you. You deserve to go somewhere where you can be proud of who you are.”

— Guillermo del Toro

5. “What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and time again? An instant of pain perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time like a blurred photograph, like an insect trapped in amber.”

— Guillermo del Toro

6. “You think if you work hard enough, you can fix the precious things you’ve broken – rather than being careful with them in the first place.”

— Guillermo del Toro

7. “You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility, I think.”

— Guillermo del Toro

8. “When the monster has a dimension that allows you to humanize it, that’s the route I usually want to go.”

— Guillermo del Toro

9. “Survival often feels like an indignity.”

— Guillermo del Toro

10. “Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge – the abyss.”

— Guillermo del Toro

11. “For horror to work, you have to be afraid. You have to keep the monster in a black and white light.”

— Guillermo del Toro

12. “If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer.”

— Guillermo del Toro

13. “Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.”

— Guillermo del Toro

14. “The underground of the city is like what’s underground in people. Beneath the surface, it’s boiling with monsters.”

— Guillermo del Toro

15. “My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican.”

— Guillermo del Toro

16. “The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you’ve been harboring since you were 7.”

— Guillermo del Toro

17. “I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget. That no matter what budget you’re doing, you should be dreaming bigger than the budget you have, and then it’s a matter of reigning it in to the reality. You try to make things count.”

— Guillermo del Toro

18. “In a world where we are so pragmatic and materialistic, fear is the only emotion that allows even a sophisticated person to believe in something beyond.”

— Guillermo del Toro

19. “For me, lost causes are the only ones that are worth fighting for. The other stuff is not worth fighting for.”

— Guillermo del Toro

20. “It was never too late to exchange the things you believed defined you for something better.”

— Guillermo del Toro

21. “Watching a movie for the first time is a flirt. Rewatching it, is a date.”

— Guillermo del Toro

22. “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.”

— Guillermo del Toro

23. “Mortals don’t understand life is not a book you close only after you read the last page. There is no last page in the Book of Life, for the last one is always the first page of another story.”

— Guillermo del Toro

24. “I don’t think there is life beyond death, I don’t. But I do believe that we get this clarity in the last minute of our life. The titles we achieved, the honors we managed, they all vanish. You are left alone with you and your deeds and the things you didn’t do. And that moment of clarity gives you either peace or the most tremendous fear, because you finally have no cover, and you finally realize exactly who you are.”

— Guillermo del Toro

25. “Her mother said fairy tales didn’t have anything to do with the world, but Ofelia knew better. They had taught her everything about it.”

— Guillermo del Toro

26. “You can’t explain success in retrospect. The moment you leap into the void, that moment is impossible to negate, after success.”

— Guillermo del Toro

27. “You need to adjust your compass to an obtainable goal.”

— Guillermo del Toro

28. “What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek.”

— Guillermo del Toro

29. “I believe in man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world.”

— Guillermo del Toro

30. “I’m the freaky version of that superhero who says, wherever there is injustice, I shall be there. Whenever there is a difficult project, I’d like to be there.”

— Guillermo del Toro

31. “Studios look backward. Filmmakers look forward.”

— Guillermo del Toro

32. “People think you’re like The Godfather, waiting for scripts to come in. But, you’re hustling, you’re desperate, you’re panicked and you’re horrified. The movie you think you’re going to do next, you don’t do. The movie you think you’re never going to do, you make.”

— Guillermo del Toro

33. “I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen.”

— Guillermo del Toro

34. “Normally my clients were my mother, my grandmother, and my dad, and I would sell them the issues with a great color cover. There was a story I remember called ‘The Invader,’ and it had an invisible dome covering a city, with a giant tentacled monster eating everybody in sight, and people trying to drill a hole in the dome. And I did these epic Prismacolor pencil illustrations and sold out the three issues to my captive audience.”

— Guillermo del Toro

35. “In consiliis nostris fatum nostrum est, the words read. “In our choices lie our fate.”

— Guillermo del Toro

36. “I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.”

— Guillermo del Toro

37. “My favorite novel in the world is Frankenstein. I’m going to misquote it horribly, but the monster says, “I have such love in me, more than you can imagine. But, if I cannot provoke it, I will provoke fear.””

— Guillermo del Toro

38. “Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.”

— Guillermo del Toro

39. “I think video games are going to completely take over storytelling in our society. Video games are not a fad...”

— Guillermo del Toro

40. “Ghosts are a metaphor that can be interpreted so many different ways. There’s no ending to what you can do. You can make it a fun ghost story. You can make it a deeply disturbing, psychological ghost story.”

— Guillermo del Toro

41. “When he looks at me, the way he looks at me... He does not know, what I lack... Or – how – I am incomplete. He sees me, for what I – am, as I am. He’s happy – to see me. Every time. Every day.”

— Guillermo del Toro

42. “In the end, perfection is just a concept – an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.”

— Guillermo del Toro

43. “The only thing you can do as an artist is to come to the world, see what no one is doing, and leave behind one or two things that wouldn’t have happened without you.”

— Guillermo del Toro

44. “I have a sort of a fetish for insects, clockwork, monsters, dark places, and unborn things.”

— Guillermo del Toro

45. “She holds him, he holds her, they hold each other, and all is dark, all is light, all is ugliness, all is beauty, all is pain, all is grief, all is never, all is forever.”

— Guillermo del Toro

46. “There is beautiful in the grotesque.”

— Guillermo del Toro

47. “Power revealed is power sacrificed. The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable.”

— Guillermo del Toro

48. “The only thing I’m certain of is that uncertainty is the hardest thing in life to endure.”

— Guillermo del Toro

49. “De todos los fantasmas, los fantasmas de nuestros amores pasados son los peores.”

— Guillermo del Toro

50. “Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.”

— Guillermo del Toro