Guillermo del Toro Quotes

Music tells no truths.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

What counts is putting the intensity that you yourself have experienced into the picture. Otherwise it is just a document.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.

I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

I am not interested in representing reality. Actually, I am interested in representing reality, but that doesn't mean a naturalistic approach, which I think is kind of impossible.