Top 100 Hayao Miyazaki Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “When a man is shooting a handgun, it’s just like he is shooting because that’s his job, and he has no other choice. It’s no good. When a girl is shooting a handgun, it’s really something.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

52. “All my films are all my children.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

53. “The principle I adhere to when directing, is that I make good use of everything my staff creates. Even if they make foregrounds that don’t quite fit with my backgrounds, I never waste it and try to find the best use for it.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

54. “I find it pointless sitting in my house not working, though I like to go on extended vacations from time to time.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

55. “You always have to appeal to your audience. You always have to consider how well your project will do in terms of admissions. I abandoned many stories because of that. But I don’t get too down about it. It’s something I accepted from the time I decided to work in films.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

56. “My process is thinking, thinking and thinking – thinking about my stories for a long time.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

57. “I managed to work for more than 50 years with just paper, pencils and film. My son’s generation and the one coming up after can’t work with just paper and pencils any more. I managed to avoid using a computer. I don’t even have a cellphone. I feel lucky I managed to live like that.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

58. “I think it’s really good for a family or children to have a dog, cat, bird or whatever to grow up with.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

59. “Rather than making that a good project, I like to make the kinds of films that children can understand in five minutes what the film is about.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

60. “Prizes do not mean anything to me. I think it is more important to make a child aware of the existence of a weird creature like a water spider that breathes through its backside.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

61. “I don’t intentionally make deep movies.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

62. “I’d like more of the world go back to being wild.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

63. “I wish I was better at art. I love some of the great artists of the 19th century and, compared to them, I just feel I lack this technique that they had. They have so much skill.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

64. “I create women characters by watching the female staff at my studio. Half the staff are women.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

65. “We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

66. “When you watch the subtitled version you are probably missing just as many things. There is a layer and a nuance you’re not going to get. Film crosses so many borders these days. Of course it is going to be distorted.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

67. “Chihiro, huh? Her real name’s Chihiro? Can’t beat the power of love.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

68. “What you mean by ‘peace’ is nothing more than the endless repetition of human folly.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

69. “I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

70. “I think we should stop using nuclear power plants because it’s an old system that we can’t control.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

71. “I like underwater life.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

72. “I’ve never studied psychology.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

73. “At the time, sword and sorcery stories were quite popular. There were female warriors waving swords around as well, but the genre is populated entirely with people who have absolutely no responsibility to anyone, so I knew my story would have to be completely different from any of these.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

74. “We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

75. “Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

76. “Yet, even amidst the hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

77. “The greatness of a mind is determined by the depth of its suffering.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

78. “Utopia exists only in one’s childhood life.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

79. “The love of weaponry is often a manifestation of infantile traits in an adult.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

80. “Problems begin the moment we’re born. We’re born with infinite possibilities, only to give up on one after another. To choose one thing means to give up another. That’s inevitable. But what can you do? That’s what it is to live.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

81. “People in Japan have experienced many tsunamis and various earthquakes throughout the ages.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

82. “Those are shrines. Some people believe spirits live in them.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

83. “Maybe that’s what these films are doing. They are my way of blessing the child.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

84. “Currently computer graphics are used a great deal, but it can be excessive.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

85. “Today, all of humanity’s dreams are cursed somehow. Beautiful yet cursed dreams.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

86. “In this world of ours, the sparrow must live like a hawk if he is to fly at all.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

87. “Stop trying. Take long walks. Look at scenery. Doze off at noon. Don’t even think about flying. And then, pretty soon, you’ll be flying again.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

88. “These days, there are angry ghosts all around us, dead from wars, sickness, starvation – and nobody cares. So you say you’re under a curse? Well, so what? So’s the whole damned world.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

89. “I think 2-D animation disappeared from Disney because they made so many uninteresting films. They became very conservative in the way they created them. It’s too bad. I thought 2-D and 3-D could coexist happily.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

90. “Producing an animation series merely to fill time slots in the broadcast schedule is like generating cultural pollution.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

91. “To have a film where there’s an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that’s one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it’s not very pleasant to draw evil figures.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

92. “Once you have met someone, you never really forget them.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

93. “The winds of time eventually turn them into the tools of industrial civillisation. It’s never unscathed.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

94. “Personally I am very pessimistic. But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can’t help but bless them for a good future. Because I can’t tell that child, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have come into this life.’ And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

95. “Danger doesn’t always come from the enemy.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

96. “Whoever falls, hatred will breed hatred.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

97. “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

98. “There’s an old saying, ‘Look not into the heart of the Ohmu.’ They say if you do, you’ll never come back...”

— Hayao Miyazaki

99. “Once you’ve met someone you really never forget them; it just takes a while for your memory to return.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

100. “Maybe there was a time when you could make films that mattered, but now?”

— Hayao Miyazaki