Top 200 Guillermo del Toro Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The most intelligent of creatures,” he offers softly, “often make the fewest sounds.”

— Guillermo del Toro

52. “There’s nothing that defines who you are more than boundaries, whether you cross them or not, in every aspect of your life, and horror is a really great boundary.”

— Guillermo del Toro

53. “Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined.”

— Guillermo del Toro

54. “You give yourself to the world for people to either praise or destroy.”

— Guillermo del Toro

55. “Every mundanity of life grows infinitely more precious in the face of impending death.”

— Guillermo del Toro

56. “What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone’s library is like peeking into their DNA.”

— Guillermo del Toro

57. “Awareness of insanity does not make one any less insane. Awareness of drowning does not make one any less of a drowning person – it only adds the burden of panic.”

— Guillermo del Toro

58. “We are such skeptics that we find it difficult to believe in God and angels and a spiritual afterlife, but a moment of fear makes our spirit so vulnerable that it allows us to believe in something beyond that.”

— Guillermo del Toro

59. “Movies that look safe are less interesting.”

— Guillermo del Toro

60. “If film making is magic, there’s a difference between close up magic and David Copperfield. If you’re doing close up magic, which independent filmmakers do, it is a very delicate craft, interpersonal relationship, and being able to enrapture a very small audience.”

— Guillermo del Toro

61. “Rod Serling once observed, “The greatest fear of all is fear of the unknown, which you can’t share with others.”

— Guillermo del Toro

62. “I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.”

— Guillermo del Toro

63. “God is an energy, rather than an anthropomorphic being, and God’s language is biology. Red blood cells, the principle of magnetic attraction, neurological synapse: each is a miracle, and in each is the presence and flow of God.”

— Guillermo del Toro

64. “As a child that was disenfranchised from everything, and that was in a world that was the wrong size, run by the wrong people, the wrong morale and the wrong rules, I felt completely outside of that, and I wanted some measure of control, and the measure of control I found was through fear.”

— Guillermo del Toro

65. “I am the nice adversary, the guy that’s going to ask the tough questions and is not going to be happy with the quick answer.”

— Guillermo del Toro

66. “It is the concern of every immigrant that their offspring will grow to embrace their adoptive culture at the expense of their natural heritage.”

— Guillermo del Toro

67. “Monsters are the patron saints of otherness.”

— Guillermo del Toro

68. “The reality is that I feel that fear is a very spiritual emotion.”

— Guillermo del Toro

69. “I love the creation of these things – I love the sculpting, I love the coloring. Half the joy is fabricating the world, the creatures.”

— Guillermo del Toro

70. “The raindrops were tears too. The whole world was crying.”

— Guillermo del Toro

71. “Men meet a woman who’s mute, they take advantage of her. Never once on a date did a man ever try to communicate, not really. They just grabbed, and took, as if she, voiceless as an animal, was an animal. This is better. The man from the dream, hazy as he is, is better.”

— Guillermo del Toro

72. “With supernatural things, I have heard ghosts, but I’ve never seen ghosts. I do seek ghosts and I would love to see one, but I would crap my pants.”

— Guillermo del Toro

73. “I like John Carpenter. I like some of his films more than others.”

— Guillermo del Toro

74. “We’re all made of stardust Mr. Strickland. Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and calcium. If some of us get our way and our Countries fire off their warheads, then we shall return to stardust. All of us. And what color will our stars be then? That is the question. A question you might ask yourself.”

— Guillermo del Toro

75. “I think part of making movies is dealing with restrictions of freedom and budget. I’d rather deal with restrictions of budget. It’s better to feel free within any budget.”

— Guillermo del Toro

76. “It’s as hard to explain as a sexual proclivity. Some guys like high-heeled shoes. I like horror.”

— Guillermo del Toro

77. “She realizes that, down here, hate has no purpose. Down here, you embrace your foes until they become your friends. Down here, you seek not to be one being, but all beings, and all at once, God and Chemosh and everything in between. The change in her isn’t only mental. It’s physical, of skin and muscle. Yes, she has arrived. She is full. She is perfect.”

— Guillermo del Toro

78. “But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil’s Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.”

— Guillermo del Toro

79. “Coffee – a barbaric drink. That poor, tortured bean. All that fermenting and husking and roasting and grinding. And what is tea? Tea is dried leaves rehydrated. Just add water, Mrs. Strickland. All living things need water.”

— Guillermo del Toro

80. “To learn what we fear is to learn who we are.”

— Guillermo del Toro

81. “I think when you get all the money and all the freedom, rarely do you get a good movie out of it or a movie that you’re proud of.”

— Guillermo del Toro

82. “The proper term is “occultation.” The moon occults the sun, casting a small shadow onto the surface of the earth. It is not a solar eclipse, but in fact an eclipse of the earth.”

— Guillermo del Toro

83. “I have my library separate from the family home, and every room is a different genre. The only room that I can guarantee I’ve read everything is the horror room.”

— Guillermo del Toro

84. “But I can’t be alone, can I? Of course not; I’m not that special. Anomalies like me exist all around the world. So when does an anomaly quit being an anomaly and start being just the way things happen to be? What if you and I are not the last of our kinds, but one of the first? The first of better creatures in a better wold? We can hope, can’t we? That we’re not of the past, but the future?”

— Guillermo del Toro

85. “Sometimes the objects we hold dear give away who we are even more than the people we love.”

— Guillermo del Toro

86. “Libraries don’t keep secrets; they reveal them.”

— Guillermo del Toro

87. “An absence of fear, Elisa realizes, can be mistaken for happiness, but it isn’t the same thing. Not even close.”

— Guillermo del Toro

88. “Zelda is black and fat. Yolanda is Mexican and homely. Antonio is a cross-eyed Dominican. Duane is of mixed race and has no teeth. Lucille is albino. Elisa is mute. To Fleming, they are all the same: unfit for other work and therefore easy to trust.”

— Guillermo del Toro

89. “Something warned me that what I might see would haunt me forever.”

— Guillermo del Toro

90. “Never fly commercial. That’s the moral of this story.”

— Guillermo del Toro

91. “I only produce things that have so much in common with what I like. I wanna understand what I’m doing. I wanna understand the instincts that are going to inform the story.”

— Guillermo del Toro

92. “In the face of such terror and dehumanization, human passion itself was an act of defiance.”

— Guillermo del Toro

93. “I think damage to the eye or damage to the teeth is one of the most universally cringing things you can do in a movie and these are very fragile sounds.”

— Guillermo del Toro

94. “There’s something worse than not making a movie. It’s doing it for the wrong reasons. Then you end up putting three, four, five years of your life into it and you come out with a thing that you’re not proud of.”

— Guillermo del Toro

95. “If you’re doing a big spectacle film, you’ve got to be mindful of large masses. Even then, you’ve got to be responsible only to your storytelling.”

— Guillermo del Toro

96. “I had gotten to the point where I just didn’t want to perform anymore – I didn’t want to be on the chopping block anymore. I started to want to withdraw and retreat from it.”

— Guillermo del Toro

97. “Well I think effects are tools.”

— Guillermo del Toro

98. “You can only be a good father in relationship to your childhood.”

— Guillermo del Toro

99. “America is old tobacco: gold and green. It’s lush and literally feels like wealth, like optimism, turn of the century America where everything was blooming.”

— Guillermo del Toro

100. “Only books talked about all the things adults didn’t want you to ask about – Life. Death. Good and Evil. And what else truly mattered in life.”

— Guillermo del Toro