Top 50 M. Night Shyamalan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Always in life bad times will lead to great times.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

2. “My biggest fear in life is to be average.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

3. “The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you’re playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It’s real. You’re confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

4. “When you say fear of the unknown, that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and its genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because were not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

5. “Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world, to not know why you’re here. That’s – that’s just an awful feeling.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

6. “Is it possible that there are no coincidences?”

— M. Night Shyamalan

7. “I find it very eerie when somebody is being really polite.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

8. “See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky?”

— M. Night Shyamalan

9. “I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

10. “Here’s how Andreas Schleicher, who directs those PISA tests, puts it: “The best way to find out whether what students have learned at school matters for their life is to actually watch what happens to them after they leave school.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

11. “There’s no staying where you were. If you’re not doing anything, your skills and point of view are atrophying.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

12. “There is no one looking out for us. We are all alone.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

13. “If I’m hesitant at all about an idea, then that’s not the right idea.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

14. “People break down into two groups when the experience something lucky. Group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

15. “Move children! Vamanos!”

— M. Night Shyamalan

16. “Giving should be a part of your routine, just like working out, eating, and sleeping.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

17. “Anime is intended to have ambiguous features. That’s part of the art form.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

18. “When you find your voice, your life takes on grace.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

19. “Sometimes we do not do things that we wish to do, so others will not know that we wish to do them.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

20. “Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can’t see the bigger picture.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

21. “My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

22. “Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

23. “Now that we know who you are, I know who I am. I’m not a mistake! It all makes sense! In a comic, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain’s going to be? He’s the exact opposite of the hero. And most times they’re friends, like you and me! I should’ve known way back when... You know why, David? Because of the kids. They called me Mr Glass.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

24. “Basically, when I’m writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

25. “You don’t get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can’t.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

26. “For instance, The Sixth Sense had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

27. “I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

28. “One of the reasons I really love low budget filmmaking is you don’t have to think about that as much. You can have more fun and be more playful and be freer creatively.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

29. “There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It’s something that I’m very careful about, that I’m just leaning too hard into something.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

30. “There are a lot of things I can take, and a few that I can’t. What I can’t take is when my older brother, who’s everything that I want to be, starts losing faith in things. I saw that look in your eyes last night. I don’t ever want to see that look in your eyes again.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

31. “I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it’s an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that’s my trademark or one of them anyway!”

— M. Night Shyamalan

32. “The beauty is that we can blur film and TV a little bit more.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

33. “Each of the actors need to have their justification for saying something awful. You want everyone to have a positive and negative thing. Even a positive thing needs to have darkness in it. It needs to have depth.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

34. “I love The Killing, I love Homeland and Mad Men, all those shows that lean into the tone of things.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

35. “My philosophy is to make movies with the biggest possible budget that will allow it to be made in an independent fashion.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

36. “You’re saying, “I’m gonna do this thing,” and you have to be aware, as a rational human being, that you may not be allowed back in.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

37. “You’re never the same. You’re degrading, or you’re getting better. You don’t stay the same.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

38. “I wouldn’t describe myself as a do-gooder. That’s really more my wife. I’m kind of just the obsessed guy who’s been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

39. “I’m super confident about creative stuff, and I’m really not confident about human interactions stuff.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

40. “I’m so consistent that my director’s cuts are usually 20-25 minutes longer than the released version of the movies.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

41. “I knew the moment it happened, it was a miracle. I could have been kissing her when she threw up. It would have scarred me for life. I may never have recovered.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

42. “I had a desire to do TV and wanted to get in, in the right way, knowing that I was going to learn a lot, along the way.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

43. “Most of the time, I don’t watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That’s my classroom.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

44. “I’ve been asked to direct pilots for a lot of shows.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

45. “You don’t have your film finished when you have your director’s cut finished. It’s just a bunch of green screen.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

46. “The whole world makes comic book movies now.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

47. “I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they’re A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

48. “When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

49. “Great actors come with depth about how their character sees the world, and they completely defend it. They could defend it in a court of law, down to the reason the patient deserved this.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

50. “I want to make a bunch of small movies. I’m really interested in that for me in the future.”

— M. Night Shyamalan