Top 100 Tim Burton Quotes
#1. The Boy with Nails in His Eyes put up his aluminum tree. It looked pretty strange because he couldn't really see.
Tim Burton
#2. 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.
Tim Burton
#3. I'm gonna go live in a cave, just completely live in my interior world.
Tim Burton
#4. One person's crazyness is another person's reality.
Tim Burton
#5. I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don't.
Tim Burton
#6. Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?
Tim Burton
#7. 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.
Tim Burton
#8. Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.
Tim Burton
#9. 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.
Tim Burton
#10. Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it.
Tim Burton
#11. For some of us, Halloween is everyday.
Tim Burton
#12. And in that one grey hair I saw my whole life and I said I think I need a hair.
Tim Burton
#13. 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.
Tim Burton
#14. And I Jack, the Pumpkin King, have grown so tired of the same old thing ...
Tim Burton
#15. I don't know what it was, maybe the movie theaters in my immediate surrounding neighbourhood in Burbank, but I never saw what would be considered A movies.
Tim Burton
#16. Don't worry about how you 'should' draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.
Tim Burton
#17. Mayor: How horrible our Christmas will be!
Jack Skellington: *No.*
[the Mayor switches to his upset face]
Jack Skellington: How *jolly*!
Mayor: Oh. How *jolly* our Christmas will be
Tim Burton
#19. But she knows she has a curse on her,
a curse she cannot win.
For if someone gets too close to her,
the pins stick further in.
Tim Burton
#20. You don't know whether chimps are going to kill you or kiss you. They're very open on some levels and much more evil in a certain way.
Tim Burton
#21. There's something quite exciting when you have a history with somebody and you see them do new and different things.
Tim Burton
#22. He can't fly around tall buildings, or outrun a speeding train, the only talent he seems to have is leaving a nasty stain!
Tim Burton
#23. Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.
Tim Burton
#24. My diagnosis," he said
"for better or worse,
is that your son is the result
of an old pharaoh's curse.
Tim Burton
#25. Maybe it's just in America, but it seems that if you're passionate about something, it freaks people out. You're considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are.
Tim Burton
#26. 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.
Tim Burton
#27. Drawing is exercise for a restless imagination.
Tim Burton
#28. I had seen other stop-motion animated features, and they were either not engaging or they're just too bizarre. There was one I liked when I was a kid called Mad Monster Party. People thought Nightmare was the first stop-motion animated monster musical, but that was.
Tim Burton
#29. Stick Boy liked Match Girl,
He liked her a lot.
He liked her cute figure,
he thought she was hot.
But could a flame ever burn
for a match and a stick?
It did quite literally;
he burned up quick.
Tim Burton
#30. It's always an interesting challenge to see if you can create a character that's got emotion.
Tim Burton
#31. For me, fantasy has always been a means of exploring reality: it explores the fact that your internal life, your dreams and the weird images and the things that come to you are things that are actually important tools for dealing with real issues.
Tim Burton
#32. I've always been misrepresented. You know, I could dress in a clown costume and laugh with the happy people but they'd still say I'm a dark personality.
Tim Burton
#33. Good morning starshine the earth says hello....
Tim Burton
#34. First of all, you make a movie that you want to see and then you just hope for the best.
Tim Burton
#35. I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was. I was much more terrified by my own family and real life, you know?
Tim Burton
#36. A lot of things you see as a child remain with you ... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.
Tim Burton
#37. Unwisely, Santa offered a teddy bear to James, unaware
he had been mauled by a grizzly earlier this year.
Tim Burton
#38. That's what I always loved about [Federico] Fellini's films: You see the weird joy of the weird filmmaking family and the abstract craziness that goes along with it, and there's something about it that's quite beautiful.
Tim Burton
#39. They took a baseball bat and whacked open his head. Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes.
Tim Burton
#40. Minister: Welcome, brother! Do you reject Satan and all his works?
Bunny Breckinridge: Sure.
Tim Burton
#41. My parents suffered from that ideal of a perfect nuclear family. They found that a difficult pressure, I think.
Tim Burton
#42. I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world.
Tim Burton
#43. Alone and rejected, Mummy Boy wept,
then went to the cabinet
where the snack food was kept.
Tim Burton
#44. Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that's why we're all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it's actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.
Tim Burton
#45. The great thing about visual horror films is there's real potential for strong, beautiful imagery. It's the one genre that really lends itself to creating strong images. And I've always loved that idea of windmills - your mind aimlessly spinning.
Tim Burton
#46. I was never interested in what everybody else was interested in. I was very interiorized. I always felt kind of sad.
Tim Burton
#47. 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.
Tim Burton
#48. 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.
Tim Burton
#49. The problem with film is you never know when you're going to be able to make a film so you can't have people waiting around for you. Sometimes it's fun to work with the same people and work with new people and mix it up.
Tim Burton
#50. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not necessarily in that order.
Tim Burton
#51. One person's craziness is another person's reality.
Tim Burton
#52. My name is Jimmy, but my friends just call me the hideous penguin boy.
Tim Burton
#53. It's really nice to work with people who understand and really love the artistry of building sets, it's great.
Tim Burton
#54. People always think I get really good reviews, but I don't. That's why I don't go on the Internet much - because you can go down a dark hole looking at stuff. Once, I clicked on my name and freaked out. It's too bizarre, it's too weird, it's too unsettling.
Tim Burton
#55. Even if you're doing something that the studio sends you, or something that's based on a book or story, at the end of it all, you try to make whatever it is your own. This is based on my love of horror movies. Everything is based on something, in some way.
Tim Burton
#56. I did some sports. It was a bit frustrating. I wasn't the greatest sports person.
Tim Burton
#57. I've found that the people who play villains are the nicest people in the world and people who play heroes are jerks.
Tim Burton
#58. If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.
Tim Burton
#59. Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book.
Tim Burton
#60. 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.
Tim Burton
#61. When you don't have many friends and you don't have a social life you're kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There's a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you're part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships.
Tim Burton
#62. Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.
Tim Burton
#63. Son, are you happy? I don't mean to pry, but do you dream of Heaven? Have you ever wanted to die?
Tim Burton
#64. 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.
Tim Burton
#65. My kid is a product of the fast computer lifestyle.
Tim Burton
#66. I am not a dark person and I don't consider myself dark.
Tim Burton
#67. 3D is great, but I just think of it as another tool, like colour or music or sound. It has the potential to add another emotional layer to certain things if you use it right. But it's not the saviour [of the movies], the be all and end all, the reason to do something.
Tim Burton
#68. I'm a happy-go-lucky manic-depressive. It does get very deep and dark for me, and it gets scary at times when I feel I can't pull out of it. But I don't consider myself negative-negative. I'm positive-negative.
Tim Burton
#69. I wouldn't know a good script if it bit me in the face.
Tim Burton
#70. When it comes to art and science, people don't like a lot of either. Instead of being open to it, they're closed off about it.
Tim Burton
#71. I always treated the science thing and the art thing as quite similar thematically.
Tim Burton
#72. Get away from meeeee!" Edgar -Frankiewinnie
Tim Burton
#73. Can a heart break, once it's stopped beating?
Tim Burton
#74. I am the shadow on the moon at night/Filling your dreams to the brim with fright.
Tim Burton
#75. I don't have a dog, because I travel too much. I don't want to just leave it abandoned.
Tim Burton
#76. If you ever had a pet, with me it was a dog, with that sort of unconditional love that only dogs can give, people can't do that; that sort of thing where it's very powerful, it's kind of your first love and your first real relationship, and usually your first experience with death.
Tim Burton
#77. It's very nice to have someone that you can have a completely abstract conversation with and leave the room, feel like everything's fine, and then realize that if you pick it apart, you have absolutely no idea what either of you said.
Tim Burton
#78. I had never really done something that was more of a horror film, and its funny, because those are the kind of movies that I like probably more than any other genre. The script had images in it that I liked.
Tim Burton
#79. 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.
Tim Burton
#80. One of the things that we were trying to do with this show was the complexities of relationships and love. There is both passion and longing and a bittersweet quality to it that is a part of life.
Tim Burton
#81. I always felt that Hollywood has a way of making you feel outside.
Tim Burton
#82. One of the things I loved about the musical was that you listened to the soundtrack and it told you the story.
Tim Burton
#83. Every day is Halloween, isnt it? For some of us ...
Tim Burton
#84. Why would you want to go up there, when people are dying to get down here?
Tim Burton
#85. 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.
Tim Burton
#86. If I had a choice about going to a meeting at a studio or changing a nappy, I'd choose the nappy.
Tim Burton
#87. Nobody had his [Ed Wood's] style. That's something I try to do in my films. You have your own kind of cryptic messages in there - cryptic things that most people wouldn't understand but are important to you. Things that kind of keep you going through the process.
Tim Burton
#88. 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.
Tim Burton
#89. Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It's less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.
Tim Burton
#90. Some people get therapy, some people get to make movies.
Tim Burton
#91. When we were growing up and saw a Ray Harryhausen movie, we were interested in how it was done. But thank God we got to go through the magic of seeing it before we knew how it was done. You were able to get this beautiful, pure, visceral response to something without knowing too much about it.
Tim Burton
#92. Technology is technology and then art form and people's creativity is another thing. Anything that helps an artist do anything - great! Technology for technology sake doesn't mean much to me anyway.
Tim Burton
#93. 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.
Tim Burton
#94. I always liked strange characters.
Tim Burton
#95. I don't really dream, I space out during the day - that's one of my problems wonder off when someone's talking to me. I can't remember any dreams in my life. There's so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.
Tim Burton
#96. It's great when you know somebody and they keep surprising you.
Tim Burton
#97. We all know interspecies romance is weird.
Tim Burton
#98. People told me I couldn't kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice.
Tim Burton
#99. It's good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.
Tim Burton
#100. I'm not a big fan of spiders, rats, especially if they're like - I got up one morning on a holiday recently, and there was a centipede in the bed that big. I wasn't very happy about that.
Tim Burton
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
