Guillermo del Toro Quotes

I consider all my films experiments.

Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.

If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry

Because the artist deals in future realities, he always seeks improvements or changes in the existing reality. This makes the artist, inevitably and invariably, a rebel against the status quo. The artist, day by day, by postulating the new realities of the future, accomplishes peaceful revolution.

If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

The definition of art has to shift whenever an innovator appears.

I think every filmmaker wants... I don't know about every filmmaker. I certainly want my films to just exist. I want them to be judged for what they are and analyzed, accepted, criticized, whatever you want to call it, on their own terms, not as part of some mall-cop genre.

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.

The poet is the one who breaks through our habits.

A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.

Independent film is taking risks in all areas. It's not just about complicated women.

Whenever a really passionate, talented filmmaker seems to have an interest in me, I take it very seriously because I like to work.

Conventional wisdom can get us into so much trouble, especially as artists.

I like to break down barriers and I think that Hollywood is doing the same thing over and over. I want to do something new and say, "Let's evolve as artists!"

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

All the films are hits before you turn the camera on. It's only in the execution that they fail. I've been less than happy with the way a couple of films were edited, but it's a director's prerogative and you gotta go with it.

I think the people who are saying jazz has to sound a particular way, or "what you're doing isn't jazz," are just scared because they can't do it. A lot of them just aren't talented enough to do anything new, honestly. It's the people who are talented enough and who have the open mind and who are forward-thinkers are the ones who are doing something new. You tend to hate on what you can't produce.

All art is based on non-conformity.

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.

He [Michael Cimino] wasn't the typical filmmaker. I don't know if he had more in him, he certainly had a lot of scripts. I know he wrote a hell of a lot.

Unfortunately, our existing traditional thinking habits insist that you must attack something and show it to be bad before you can suggest a change. It is more difficult to acknowledge that something is excellent and then to ask for change because although it is excellent, it is not enough.

Artists are free to push boundaries to make art. But when pushing boundaries is their only aim, the result is usually bad art.

Art demands of us that we shall not stand still.

Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.