Matthew Lillard Quotes

I'm becoming more squeamish. I didn't use to be - nine years of 'Silent Witness' prepared me for most things one will have the misfortune to see in life. Before, I'd be wading up to my neck in gore, but now I tend to look away.

I'm not desensitized to death.

A girl my age had been murdered in these woods and I'd seen her last terrified moments, watched her bleed to death in this forest. A life like mine had ended here, and it didn't matter how many times I'd seen deaths in movies, it wasn't the same, and I wasn't ever going to forget it.

The more real the murder is, the less interested I am in seeing it. It's hard enough to watch the news.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

All I can really say is it's bloodier than hell. In this one I'm going to be much more direct and honest in my description of the actual killings and the crime scene.

I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.

I am profoundly fascinated by cruelty, fear, horror and death. My films show my preoccupation with violence, the pathology of violence.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

I just don't believe in joking about violence anymore.

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

Stories come from violence, they come from sex. They come from death. They come from the dark places that everyone has to go to, kind of wants to, or doesn't, but needs to deal with. If you raise a kid to think everything is sunshine and flowers, they're going to get into the real world and die. That's the reason fairy tales are so creepy, because we need to encapsulate these things, to inoculate ourselves against them, so that when we're confronted by the genuine horror that is day-to-day life we don't go insane.

I didn't want people to go out wanting to go tool up against the bad guys (and at impressionable ages). I said, don't shy away from the violence or pull back on this, commit to this.

I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

I can't watch the news. It's extremely unsettling. Certain people can be a little desensitized because of movies, and I'm totally a part of that world, so I understand. But when you're actually seeing what's happening, you can't help but be a little affected.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

When you're dealing with killing people and things that are upsetting, that can be a delicate place to occupy yourself for a day.

When the old men fight, the young people die.

I saw corpses, and grew used to their unimportant look, for a dead man without any of the panoply of death is a desperately insignificant object.

Mutilated corpses with a chance of afternoon showers. I got dressed and went to work.

I couldn't stop bawling, watching the towers come down. it was a terrible thing to happen. And a terrible thing to realize that I don't sit though the nigh crying when such horrors happen all the time.

Everyone wants to see someone shoot someone in the head.