Quentin Tarantino, born on March 27, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, is a highly influential American filmmaker celebrated for his unique style, blending pop culture, nonlinear narratives, and diverse genres. With notable films like “Pulp Fiction” (1994), “Kill Bill” (2003, 2004), and “Django Unchained” (2012), Tarantino has garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards. His directorial debut, “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), showcased his distinctive approach to storytelling. The Academy Award-winning “Inglourious Basterds” (2009) and “Django Unchained” reflect his exploration of historical and social themes. Tarantino’s work often features sharp dialogue, intense violence, and references to cinematic influences. His impact on the film industry remains profound, cementing his legacy as a visionary and influential director.
Quentin Tarantino Quotes
1. “When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’”
— Quentin Tarantino
2. “Violence is fun, man.”
— Quentin Tarantino
3. “I didnt go to film school, i went to films.”
— Quentin Tarantino
4. “I steal from every movie ever made.”
— Quentin Tarantino
5. “If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.”
— Quentin Tarantino
6. “If a Million People See My Movie, I Hope They See a Million Different Movies.”
— Quentin Tarantino
7. “If you want to make a movie, make it. Don’t wait for a grant, don’t wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it.”
— Quentin Tarantino
8. “To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.”
— Quentin Tarantino
9. “If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions.”
— Quentin Tarantino
10. “I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.”
— Quentin Tarantino
11. “I’ve always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that’s like my last draft of the screenplay.”
— Quentin Tarantino
12. “Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.”
— Quentin Tarantino
13. “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my fingers upon thee!”
— Quentin Tarantino
14. “Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.”
— Quentin Tarantino
15. “I don’t judge my characters, and that’s my job not to judge them.”
— Quentin Tarantino
16. “You don’t have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can’t help but make a good movie.”
— Quentin Tarantino
17. “Don’t write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what’s in your heart.”
— Quentin Tarantino
18. “I’m a historian in my own mind.”
— Quentin Tarantino
19. “The good ideas will survive.”
— Quentin Tarantino
20. “I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away.”
— Quentin Tarantino
21. “I’ll write for a while and then I’ll find an appropriate song and in a weird way the music will keep me in the mood. I find music to define the mood of the movie, the rhythm the movie is going to play in.”
— Quentin Tarantino
22. “In real life there are no bad guys. Everybody just has their own perspective.”
— Quentin Tarantino
23. “I don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards – in the life of an artist.”
— Quentin Tarantino
24. “Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It’s when a scene works emotionally and it’s cool and clever, then it’s great. That’s what you want.”
— Quentin Tarantino
25. “I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It’s all language, it’s all communication.”
— Quentin Tarantino
26. “A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.”
— Quentin Tarantino
27. “There’s only one list that’s more illustrious than the list of directors who won the Palme d’Or. It’s the list of directors who didn’t.”
— Quentin Tarantino
28. “If I’m doing my job right, then I’m not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I’m just jotting it down.”
— Quentin Tarantino
29. “I’m not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I’m gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it’d almost be okay because I did it. It’s there on the page.”
— Quentin Tarantino
30. “All my movies are achingly personal.”
— Quentin Tarantino
31. “Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn’t mean I’m anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.”
— Quentin Tarantino
32. “You can’t write poetry on the computer.”
— Quentin Tarantino
33. “I am not going to tell you how I believe, but I do believe in God.”
— Quentin Tarantino
34. “To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.”
— Quentin Tarantino
35. “I’ve always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.”
— Quentin Tarantino
36. “If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn’t be writing screenplays. I’d be writing novels.”
— Quentin Tarantino
37. “There are two ways: my way and the highway.”
— Quentin Tarantino
38. “The children despise their parents until the age of when they suddenly become just like them – thus preserving the system.”
— Quentin Tarantino
39. “I write movies about mavericks, about people who break rules, and I don’t like movies about people who are pulverised for being mavericks.”
— Quentin Tarantino
40. “There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.”
— Quentin Tarantino
41. “I couldn’t spell anything. I couldn’t remember anything, but I could go to a movie and I knew who starred in it, who directed it, everything.”
— Quentin Tarantino
42. “I’m very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I’ve never really considered myself a writer.”
— Quentin Tarantino
43. “If you’re trying to drop ten pages from a screenplay, it hurts like hell, but if you just put it away for a month and then take it out, you can do it just like that!”
— Quentin Tarantino
44. “Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.”
— Quentin Tarantino
45. “I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that’s becoming like a lost art in American cinema.”
— Quentin Tarantino
46. “I don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker, making old-man movies, and I don’t want to be the one not to know when to leave the party.”
— Quentin Tarantino
47. “The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way.”
— Quentin Tarantino
48. “When I’m writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I’m doing it, as I’m writing it.”
— Quentin Tarantino
49. “Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that’s what I’m trying to do.”
— Quentin Tarantino
50. “To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you’re writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can’t lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.”
— Quentin Tarantino
51. “Violence in real life is terrible; violence in movies can be cool. It’s just another colour to work with.”
— Quentin Tarantino
52. “You know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It’s the little differences.”
— Quentin Tarantino
53. “When you gotta go out and make a movie to pay for the kid’s private school and for the three ex-wives, don’t talk to me about your artistry. It’s their job. It’s not my job. It’s my calling.”
— Quentin Tarantino
54. “I don’t believe in elitism. I don’t think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”
— Quentin Tarantino
55. “Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I’m not interested in, I can’t even feign interest.”
— Quentin Tarantino
56. “He musta thought it was white boy day. It ain’t white boy day, is it?”
— Quentin Tarantino
57. “Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.”
— Quentin Tarantino
58. “I surprised myself, that I was in the tissue of the character enough, that I could actually come up with something that I didn’t actually feel or didn’t believe.”
— Quentin Tarantino
59. “One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It’s your voice that’s important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can’t be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you’re the writer and the director.”
— Quentin Tarantino
60. “Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.”
— Quentin Tarantino
61. “You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.”
— Quentin Tarantino
62. “I won’t even think about acting in a role where I didn’t do a back story for a character.”
— Quentin Tarantino
63. “Batman is not a very interesting character. For any actor. There is simply not much to play. I think Michael Keaton did it the best, and I wish good luck to Ben Affleck. But, you know who would have made a great Batman? Alec Baldwin in the ’80s.”
— Quentin Tarantino
64. “CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the ’70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They’re really doing it and risking their lives.”
— Quentin Tarantino
65. “I am a genre lover – everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.”
— Quentin Tarantino
66. “To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.”
— Quentin Tarantino
67. “Critics don’t want to see directors they like make too much of a left turn. That’s good for criticism.”
— Quentin Tarantino
68. “I’m not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.”
— Quentin Tarantino
69. “If you love cinema as much as I do, and not many people do, and if you are focused and actually have something to offer, you will get somewhere with it.”
— Quentin Tarantino
70. “I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can’t ever remember a time when I didn’t.”
— Quentin Tarantino
71. “I hope to give you at least 15 more years of movies. I’m not going to be this old guy that keeps cranking them out. My plan is to have a theater by that time in some small town and I will be the manager this crazy old movie guy.”
— Quentin Tarantino
72. “I always do an all-night horror marathon on Saturdays where we start at seven and go until five in the morning.”
— Quentin Tarantino
73. “I’ve always wanted to work with Warren Beatty.”
— Quentin Tarantino
74. “Sure, and that’s the cool thing about DVD: you can pack stuff on the disc that would’ve been too much for the big screen because actually it would’ve only interested yourself and a bunch of fanboys, who wanna know everything.”
— Quentin Tarantino
75. “I laugh all the time. I’m an easy laugher. You can find me on any set, because I’m always laughing.”
— Quentin Tarantino
76. “To me, torture would be watching sports on television.”
— Quentin Tarantino
77. “I don’t think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.”
— Quentin Tarantino
78. “Movies are not about the weekend that they’re released, and in the grand scheme of things, that’s probably the most unimportant time of a film’s life.”
— Quentin Tarantino
79. “I definitely have some colleagues that I respect, and we get together from time to time. But I actually have just like genuine friends.”
— Quentin Tarantino
80. “I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.”
— Quentin Tarantino
81. “Everybody always talks about the science fiction genre, in particular, which always makes me think about people in spaceships. I can appreciate that, but that’s not really where I think my dramatist aspect lies.”
— Quentin Tarantino
82. “I don’t have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn’t a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.”
— Quentin Tarantino
83. “I like my song-sequences in my movies, but one of the things I like about them, is I get in and I get out.”
— Quentin Tarantino
84. “I’m a big collector of vinyl – I have a record room in my house – and I’ve always had a huge soundtrack album collection.”
— Quentin Tarantino
85. “I was trying to do like a Spaghetti Western but using World War II iconography.”
— Quentin Tarantino
86. “If I wasn’t a film-maker, I’d be a film critic. It’s the only thing I’d be qualified to do.”
— Quentin Tarantino
87. “You should be semi-embarrasse d about certain people seeing your movie.”
— Quentin Tarantino
88. “I want to have the fun of doing anime and I love anime, but I can’t do storyboards because I can’t really draw and that’s what they live and die on.”
— Quentin Tarantino
89. “It’s nice to get invited to the parties and to be able to hobnob and celebrate a job well done with your colleagues.”
— Quentin Tarantino
90. “I love Elmore Leonard. To me, True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie.”
— Quentin Tarantino
91. “Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I’m lucky enough to be in the position where I don’t make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.”
— Quentin Tarantino
92. “The next movie will be in Mandarin. I enjoyed shooting all the Japanese stuff in Kill Bill so much that this whole film will be entirely in Mandarin.”
— Quentin Tarantino
93. “I’ve always said Thomas Edison invented the movie camera to show people killing and kissing.”
— Quentin Tarantino
94. “What the internet has done is destroy film criticism. I would never have guessed that the profession of film criticism would be going the way of the dodo bird.”
— Quentin Tarantino
95. “I always knew I wanted to do a Western. And trying to think of what that would be, I always figured that if I did a Western, it would have a lot of the aesthetics of Spaghetti Westerns, because I really like them.”
— Quentin Tarantino
96. “My mom took me to see Carnal Knowledge and The Wild Bunch and all these kind of movies when I was a kid.”
— Quentin Tarantino
97. “Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals.”
— Quentin Tarantino
98. “Say ‘auf wiedersehen’ to your nazi balls.”
— Quentin Tarantino
99. “Suddenly, Westerns, which were our action films and what the working man went to see to blow off steam and have a good time, became boring to most people growing up from the Eighties on, because they’re kind of pastoral.”
— Quentin Tarantino
100. “I’m not a huge big fan of music video.”
— Quentin Tarantino
