Top 35 Tim Burton Quotes

Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else‘s dreams?

Working on ‘Nightmare Before Christmas,’ I had endless arguments, like the studio saying, ‘You can’t have a main character that’s got no eyeballs!’ ‘How is anybody going to feel for somebody with just eyesockets?’ You know? So, it’s those kind of things that really wear you down.

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it’s not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

I can’t remember any dreams in my life. There’s so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.

There’s something about seeing this little inanimate object coming to life that’s just very exciting. That’s why with ‘Nightmare’ I held out for so long to do it.

I think of Ray Harryhausen’s work – I knew his name before I knew any actor or director‘s names. His films had an impact on me very early on, probably even more than Disney. I think that’s what made me interested in animation: His work.

My parents suffered from that ideal of a perfect nuclear family. They found that a difficult pressure, I think.

I always liked strange characters.

I get so tired of people saying, ‘Oh, you only make fantasy films and this and that’, and I’m like, ‘Well no, fantasy is reality‘, that’s what Lewis Carroll showed in his work.

It’s hard to find logic in things sometimes. That’s why I can’t analyze things too much, because it often doesn’t make much sense.

Whether you like it or not, a child really connects you to that time when everything‘s new. It’s so important – not just for artistic endeavors, but for humanity.

Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book.

Things like ‘mad as a hatter’ or ‘grinning like a Cheshire cat‘, are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.

If I had a choice about going to a meeting at a studio or changing a nappy, I’d choose the nappy.

A lot of things you see as a child remain with you… you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.

I don’t look at my films or my old drawings much, so that was an interesting way to kind of reconnect with myself a bit.

It’s good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.

Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.

When I went to Warner Bros., there was a woman named Bonnie Lee who was an executive who helped me to get to ‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.’

I have a problem when people say something’s real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I’ve always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.

When you’re making a movie, it’s a very interiorised world.

I wouldn’t know a good script if it bit me in the face.

I guess I feel so tortured most of the time, when I see someone else feeling tortured, I get a little perverse glee out of it.

It’s like getting into film – I didn’t say early on, ‘I’m going to become a filmmaker,’ ‘I’m going to show my work at MoMA.’ When you start to think those things, you’re in trouble.

When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.

In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn’t work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They’re relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.

Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. And I certainly would never read anything written by Kevin Smith.

Jack Nicholson is a textbook actor who’s very intuitive. He is absolutely brilliant at going as far as you can go, always pushing to the edge, but still making it seem real.

I am not a big technology person. I don’t go on the Internet really much at all. Drawing is like a zen thing; it’s private, which in this day and age is harder to come by.

To be honest, whatever troubles I’ve had, I’ve also gotten the opportunities to do things.

I find that the most special thing to me is if you’ve connected to people in some way: If someone comes up to you on the street and says something to you, and you know it’s meant something to them, and it’s connected to some project. That, I find, is amazing.

I’ve always been more comfortable making my decisions from the subconscious level, or more emotionally, because I find it is more truthful to me; Intellectually, I don’t think like that because I get uncomfortable.

I did some sports. It was a bit frustrating. I wasn’t the greatest sports person.

I remember early in my career with Disney, which was a very strange time in the company – there were a couple of executives who were very supportive of me and kind of let me do my own thing.

People told me I couldn’t kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice.