25 Quotes & Sayings By Guillermo Del Toro

Guillermo del Toro is a director, producer, writer, television personality, and comic book creator. He is the Academy Award-winning director of Crimson Peak, Pacific Rim, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Pan's Labyrinth. Among his recent projects are the animated Netflix series Trollhunters and the crime thriller series The Strain.

1
So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. I have a screenplay called Mephisto's Bridge about a Faustian deal with the devil. I love them all. Guillermo Del Toro
Success is fucking up on your own terms.
2
Success is fucking up on your own terms. Guillermo Del Toro
3
I'm serious, Jim. You need to put this crap away. You walk into school on Monday talking to me, or anyone else, about the city's pesky troll problem, and you're not exactly going to get a lot of people saying, 'Gee, thanks for the warning.' It'll spread faster than mono. You think things are tough for us now? Jim, this will be the end. I'm sorry if you had a crazy nightmare. I really am. But I can't let you ruin our lives. . Guillermo Del Toro
4
He paused in the hallway, sniffing the air. He scowled, sniffed some more. He pressed an intercom button on the wall. " Betty, I distinctly smell sewage. Could you get a plumber out here ASAP?" Several curly hairs fluttered in the air after he was gone. I clutched at the arm of the dentist chair. " This isn't a joke, Tub! I'm in trouble. We're all in trouble, the whole town, the whole world! You have no clue. You have no idea what kind of things we're dealing with here. There's a whole land of --. Guillermo Del Toro
5
Something warned me that what I might see would haunt me forever. Guillermo Del Toro
6
Is it..can we..is it safe?" Tub checked the lot but he seemed unconcerned. " Coach Lawrence nabbed him for practice. We live to fight another day, soldier." " No.. I mean, the thing..is it..?" Tub frowned. " The thing. Hmmm. Can you be more specific? I clutched at the bumper and raised myself to unsteady feet. I patted the truck bed, taking solace in the cake of dust. It was real; I was not caught in a nightmare. I smeared the dust with my fingers and smelled it. " If you lick that, we're no longer friends, " Tub said. Guillermo Del Toro
7
Power revealed is power sacrificed. The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable. Guillermo Del Toro
8
I say making movies is like eating a sandwich of shit. Sometimes you get more bread, sometimes less bread, but you always get shit." (Guardian interview 2006) Guillermo Del Toro
9
The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety. And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed. Guillermo Del Toro
10
The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist. Guillermo Del Toro
11
Kelly was not going to remove her glasses. No matter what the television said about it being safe to do during the 'totality'. The television also told her she wouldn't age if she bought expensive creams and pills. Guillermo Del Toro
12
Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live; his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth. . Guillermo Del Toro
13
It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? To be dragged under? Guillermo Del Toro
14
THE THING WAS AN EXPERT IN HORROR, BUT THIS HUMAN HORROR INDEED EXCEEDED ANY OTHER POSSIBLE FATE. NOT ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS WITHOUT MERCY, BUT BECAUSE IT WAS ACTED UPON RATIONALLY AND WITHOUT COMPULSION. IT WAS A CHOICE. THE KILLING WAS UNRELATED TO THE LARGE WAR, AND IT SERVED NO OTHER PURPOSE THEN EVIL. MEN CHOSE TO DO THIS TO OTHER MEN AND INVENTED REASONS AND PLACES AND MYTHS IN ORDER TO SATISFY THEIR DESIRE IN A LOGICAL AND METHODICAL WAY. Guillermo Del Toro
15
Science has made many advances in my lifetime, but the instrument has yet to be invented that can see clearly into the marriage of a man and a woman. Guillermo Del Toro
16
In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable. Guillermo Del Toro
17
There are two levels of vampirism: one is the regular vampire, which is just like it has always been; and then there's the super vampires, which are a new breed we've created. Guillermo Del Toro
18
In the end, perfection is just a concept - an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature. Guillermo Del Toro
19
Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss. Guillermo Del Toro
20
God is an energy, rather than an anthropomorphic being, and God's language is biology. Red blood cells, the principle of magnetic attraction, neurological synapse: each is a miracle, and in each is the presence and flow of God. Guillermo Del Toro
21
Watching a movie for the first time is a flirt. Rewatching it, is a date. Guillermo Del Toro
22
Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters. Guillermo Del Toro
23
I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue. Guillermo Del Toro
24
I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen. Guillermo Del Toro