Top 100 Stanley Kubrick Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.”

— Stanley Kubrick

52. “I never learned anything at all in school and didn’t read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”

— Stanley Kubrick

53. “The hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that’s going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie.”

— Stanley Kubrick

54. “The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.”

— Stanley Kubrick

55. “I don’t like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what’s even worse, of being quoted exactly.”

— Stanley Kubrick

56. “A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.”

— Stanley Kubrick

57. “How does anybody ever think of anything?”

— Stanley Kubrick

58. “You’re constantly changing man. But the film’s not changing. The film stays the same. That’s the beautiful aspect of it.”

— Stanley Kubrick

59. “One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.”

— Stanley Kubrick

60. “I’ve got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.”

— Stanley Kubrick

61. “The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.”

— Stanley Kubrick

62. “Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.”

— Stanley Kubrick

63. “Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.”

— Stanley Kubrick

64. “Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write ‘War and Peace’ in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.”

— Stanley Kubrick

65. “I haven’t had one sexual thought since the court martial.”

— Stanley Kubrick

66. “There’s something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.”

— Stanley Kubrick

67. “You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.”

— Stanley Kubrick

68. “Have you ever had a single moment’s thought about my responsibilities?”

— Stanley Kubrick

69. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, Mr. President, but I do say not more than ten to twenty million dead depending upon the breaks.”

— Stanley Kubrick

70. “No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.”

— Stanley Kubrick

71. “You either care or you don’t.”

— Stanley Kubrick

72. “Take a stress pill and think things over – HAL in 2001.”

— Stanley Kubrick

73. “Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines things.”

— Stanley Kubrick

74. “Everybody has their black moments.”

— Stanley Kubrick

75. “My period as a young teenager when you really listen to music so you can get understand a little bit more about what the music is was, say, 1965 to 1968. I was just lucky to be in those times.”

— Stanley Kubrick

76. “The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.”

— Stanley Kubrick

77. “A film needs more than you can give it in a lifetime.”

— Stanley Kubrick

78. “My reputation has grown slowly.”

— Stanley Kubrick

79. “Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.”

— Stanley Kubrick

80. “Anybody who runs is a VC. Anybody who stands still is a well-disciplined VC.”

— Stanley Kubrick

81. “Don’t do anything. Just tolerate me and let me suffer, knowing how you feel.”

— Stanley Kubrick

82. “I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I’m not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone and suffering.”

— Stanley Kubrick

83. “Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.”

— Stanley Kubrick

84. “Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it’s caused me.”

— Stanley Kubrick

85. “You either connect or you don’t connect. It’s not the end of the world. It’s a movie.”

— Stanley Kubrick

86. “If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.”

— Stanley Kubrick

87. “One does not have to make Frank Capra movies to like people.”

— Stanley Kubrick

88. “I’ve never laid a cane on the back of a lord before, but if you force me to I shall speedily become used to the practice.”

— Stanley Kubrick

89. “If Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda had a baby, it would be Matthew Modine.”

— Stanley Kubrick

90. “The screen is a magic medium...”

— Stanley Kubrick

91. “Suppose by chance you do get picked up. What have you done? You shot a horse; that isn’t first degree murder; in fact, it isn’t even murder; in fact, I don’t know what it is.”

— Stanley Kubrick

92. “Critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion.”

— Stanley Kubrick

93. “What do you take me for? A fourteen karat sucker?”

— Stanley Kubrick

94. “I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.”

— Stanley Kubrick

95. “I didn’t want murder. It’s all gone wrong.”

— Stanley Kubrick

96. “If you can talk brilliantly about a problem.”

— Stanley Kubrick

97. “If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility.”

— Stanley Kubrick

98. “It’s crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.”

— Stanley Kubrick

99. “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”

— Stanley Kubrick

100. “A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction.”

— Stanley Kubrick