John Carpenter Quotes

You can't always expect to work with a director who guarantees success.

It's a roll of the dice in the movie business. I mean, every single movie is a roll of the dice. Any movie on paper could look like it's going to be fantastic. You know what I mean?

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

There is no guaranteed formula. And that's one of the interesting things about filmmaking. You could put $115 million in, and it doesn't guarantee success.

When you make a movie, you don't know how it'll turn out. You can only guess.

The world is teeming; anything can happen.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

Comedy is this weird thing. You have no idea why certain things work and other things don't work.

If someone wants to open this Pandora's box and deal with it, all right, go for it then.

Play is experimenting with chance.

My feeling about all films and all television is that it's an adventure. That's the way I have to look at it. Because you don't know what the climate of the circumstance is going to be. It could be very good. It could be very mediocre. It could be very bad. You don't know. But I've been doing it long enough now to know that it's an adventure. That's what it's all about.

Every film, obviously, everyone starts out aiming at making it good, and in the end, filmmaking is really fragile. Making a film is like building a house of cards on the deck of a speeding boat, or playing chess on train tracks. Every opportunity feels like that; it's the one artistic field that's unlike most of the others.

In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.

Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. I never know how successful a movie is going to be - when you make a movie you're always hoping for the best.

That's the gamble that you make when you decide to become a rock musician. It's totally unpredictable.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.

One thing I've learned about the Marvel universe is that it's a little bit like God... if you want to make him laugh, just make a plan.

Prediction is difficult - particularly when it involves the future.

To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.

Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.

It is not logical for art to be logical. Art goes against the grain of the times as readily as it goes with it and at the very same moment. Instead of seeking the nearest exit, art responds to a new situation by uncovering a labyrinth of problems.

Failure is built into creativity... the creative act involves this element of 'newness' and 'experimentalism,' then one must expect and accept the possibility of failure.

The funniest thing about comedy is that you never know why people laugh. I know what makes them laugh but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.