Best 70 quotes of Terry Gilliam on MyQuotes

Actually, I began to think that maybe there is a god, after all. Or maybe its a different one. The old one got fired.

All films are learning processes. I am still trying to work out how you make a movie. I didn't study at film school or any of those things. I didn't bother with film theory.

A lot of people seem to get carried away that something that's made out of paper mâché is going to be better than not. And I always thought the original King Kong, that terrible little puppet with its hair going in all directions, was far more magical than Peter Jackson's incredibly beautifully rendered King Kong. So there's something to be said for a more primitive version of things. I think it's because it makes the audience work a little bit more, because you've got to invest it with life and reality, so I like doing that.

Because I dislike being quoted I lie almost constantly when talking about my work.

Everybody gets excited about technology, but it doesn't interest me in the least. I'm only interested in it if it makes my job easier or cheaper. They're tools.

Every few years when it's been another five years that have passed and I haven't made a film and the depression starts taking over totally, I allow myself to do a commercial. And then I feel really dirty and get to work promptly.

Fantasy isn't just a jolly escape: It's an escape, but into something far more extreme than reality, or normality. It's where things are more beautiful and more wondrous and more terrifying. You move into a world of conflicting extremes.

Gorillaz virtually changed my wife...sorry, I mean, life...no, actually, it was my wife.

I can feel my dreams but I can't remember them.

I don't think you ever learn just one thing. At some point you start unlearning things. I have been working hard to unlearn everything I know.

I do think so much of what I do is reactive to the way the world sees itself, or the way the world is being portrayed. I wanted to offer an alternative to that. Whether it is accepted or not is beside the point, but it's an alternative.

I do want to say things in these films. I want audiences to come out with shards stuck in them. I don't care if people love my films or walk out, as long as they have a strong response.

I find Hollywood gives these pat stories, and they're reassuring stories, and I don't really want to give people that. Hollywood does all that work. I'm offering, sometimes, an alternative to that. The answers aren't black-and-white. There may not even be answers in certain instances. The ground is not necessarily solid, either. So you've got to keep awake the whole time, even after the movie is over.

If you really want your films to say something that you hope is unique, then patience and stamina, thick skin and a kind of stupidity, a mule-like stupidity, is what you really need.

I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Police were losing control because they were up against a world they really didn't understand.

I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world. Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.

I hate losing laughs; they're rare things.

I have always got medicine I want to give to people.

I just like the fact I can make a film which might give comfort to some people who think they are the only crazy person in the world and suddenly they see there are two crazy people in the world.

I like being a patron of things, I like patronizing things. And if it's not going to be people, I'll patronize a festival.

I'm a cartoonist, it's what I am at heart, so cartoons take reality and deform it and make it grotesque, you make it funny, but you alter it. If it works, it's based on reality. That's what I try to do.

I'm more prone to anarchy than I am to control - even though I'm a film director.

I'm overwhelmed by writers. Most people aren't impressed by writers, but if you can draw a cartoon or a picture, they think you're magic.

In advertising, I was frustrated by having to deal with the client. It was the only time I really worked in a proper office, and I didn't like it-simple as that.

I never define depression, clinical or otherwise. It's the basis of most life, it seems to me, in the modern world. We're all depressed.

Invariably, what I'm trying to do is more ambitious than the budget, but we manage to do it somehow.

I think [Hollywood] has achieved everything they’ve always dreamed of. The audience now seems to be very dumb. They pay money to watch the same film. Now, you could argue, that's because it makes them feel comfortable. When they go to a movie now, it's almost like hearing a pop song. You know the rhythms, you know when the downbeat is going to come, you know when the explosion is going to come… And so as life becomes more complex, as the economy is in trouble, people cling to what makes them comfortable, so they go again and again to see the same movie.

I think it's worse for actors, though, because people have to choose you. As a director, I get to choose the actors, but most of the time, actors have to be chosen in order to work.

I think that's the problem with kids now. Everything is manufactured. And then they're sitting there watching the television, where all the work is done for them. Radio made me use my imagination.

I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg - I don't usually admit this publicly - because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular time and play around with it - to use it as a way of luring audiences in.

I thought, how do you confuse violent Russian mobsters? Well, by being silly!

It's hard for me to worry about the studios losing money. I'm not very sympathetic to their money problems, because they certainly haven't been sympathetic to mine.

It's the shock of the world if you allow yourself to disconnect from the world and forget it's out there, how noisy it is, how busy it is, how invasive it is.

I've always sworn that not having enough money has saved me from mediocrity.

I've given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me ... and marvel stupidly.

I want brave people. Fearless ones. A good actor just goes out and leaps off the edge and develops wings on his way down, hopefully. That's the kind of people I really enjoy working with. Playing safe isn't much fun. I like danger. It's controlled danger, always, and that's why I hope I don't lure too many good actors down into the pits with me, because I hope they maintain their own unique talents.

I was an incredible Anglophile. I found people who shared the same sense of humor and attitude toward the world.

I was born in 1940 in Minnesota and grew up in the country... dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods.

I was doing political cartoons and getting angry to the point where I felt I was going to have to start making and throwing bombs. I thought I was probably a better cartoonist than a bomb maker.

I was getting frustrated with America. It's interesting how as simple a thing as, like, letting your hair grow longer changed in the world in those days.

I wasn't creative or theatrical. I was just doing everything. I was head cheerleader, valedictorian - it was ridiculous!

John Cleese was with a group called Cambridge Circus, who had come to New York, and we became friends. Years later that produced a certain team effort.

Literally overnight, I became an animator... and one that was well-known.

My problem is I'm like a junkie. I want a good movie fix, and I never get that fix.

Nobody went to see Tideland! I was hoping people would get angry about it but those that saw it didn't want to talk about it. This is the world we're living in, people don't want to discuss things that are actually worth discussing.

Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things.

People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want.

Port Talbot is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust.  Even the beach is completely littered with dust, it's just black.  The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful.  The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like 'Brazil.'  The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray.

Reality and fantasy, we need both of those to survive. If we don't have fantasy, dreams and all of those things, what's the point of carrying on? And you need to watch out for reality because buses come.

[Steven Spielberg's films] are comforting, they always give you answers and I don't think they're very clever answers. The success of most Hollywood films these days is down to fact that they're comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don't have to think about it. The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.