Top 70 John Carpenter Quotes
#1. Anybody can make a movie, if you have the will. The digital revolution has made it very inexpensive to make a film. Anybody who wants to can do it.
John Carpenter
#2. One could make money and get a career going with a low-budget horror film about killers attacking on holidays. It is always flattering to have somebody copy you.
John Carpenter
#3. Halloween put me on the map, and I'm very sad to hear of his death.
John Carpenter
#4. My earliest memories of horror are 'Friday the 13th Part 2,' John Carpenter's 'The Thing,' 'Halloween,' 'An American Werewolf in London,' and 'A Nightmare On Elm Street' ... and 'Hatchet' is so obviously inspired by those films that I may as well have made it in 1984.
Adam Green
#6. There are a lot of movies that I don't care about, especially not remakes.
John Carpenter
#7. Rich tofu-eaters would move out to the country, buy a small farm that was going under anyway and then not know what to do with it. (See Green Acres and multiply by hundreds of thousands and both members Eva Gabor. But crossed with Karen Carpenter and take away all shreds of common sense.)
John Ringo
#8. Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.
John Crowe Ransom
#9. We had many good directors - John Carpenter, Brian De Palma - but things have become polluted by business, money and bad relationships. The success of the horror genre has led to its downfall.
Dario Argento
#10. I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.
John Crowe Ransom
#11. What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.
John Carpenter
#12. You have to fight really hard for a private life, and sometimes you don't have one. It just gets to you after a while. It's tough.
John Carpenter
#13. John Adams was a farmer, Abraham Lincoln a small town lawyer. Plato and Socrates were teachers. Jesus was a carpenter. To equate wisdom and judgement with occupation is at best insulting.
Mark Sheppard
#14. I don't watch my films. I've seen 'em enough after cutting them and putting the music on. I don't ever want to see them again.
John Carpenter
#15. From a will: And to my communist nephew Oswald, I leave the sum of 10,000 pounds - to be shared equally with his fellow Britishers.
John Carpenter
#17. I don't want to be a part of the demographics. I want to be an individual. I wear each of my films as a badge of pride. That's why I cherish all my bad reviews. If the critics start liking my movies, then I'm in deep trouble.
John Carpenter
#18. What a director does ... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools.
John Carpenter
#19. I was familiar with that and 'Rio Bravo.' 'Rio Bravo' was what John Carpenter did, that brilliant move of taking a western and turning it into an urban flick. And from there you got, you know, all the cop genre movies of the time.
John Leguizamo
#20. I think there are certain subjects I don't want to tackle, that I don't think I could do a good job with. I don't think I'd be good with ... broad comedy? I don't know. Maybe I would.
John Carpenter
#21. In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers. Laurie, Jamie Lee's character, was shy and somewhat repressed. And Michael Myers, the killer, is definitely repressed. They have certain similarities.
John Carpenter
#22. When I was a kid, I loved 'The Curse of Frankenstein,' 'The Creeping Unknown,' 'X: The Unknown.' I love 'Forbidden Planet,' 'The Thing from Another World.' They were science fiction/horror movies, generally.
John Carpenter
#23. It's a very good time for horror. This business certainly has changed, but there's still room for serious horror films. Look at 28 Days Later, that's not a tongue-in-cheek picture.
John Carpenter
#24. 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' made me want to make films. I am wild about the films of John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah.
Neil Marshall
#25. As a filmmaker, it's about surviving and lasting. So many talented people that I've known in my life - directors and writers - just haven't made it and haven't had a chance.
John Carpenter
#26. Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else.
John Carpenter
#27. I can play just about any keyboard but I can't read or write a note.
John Carpenter
#28. Horror has been a genre since the beginning of cinema, all the way back to the days of silent films. I don't think it will ever go away because it's so universal. Humor doesn't always travel to other countries, but horror does.
John Carpenter
#29. Horror stories have always worked on film. It's where they work. That's where vampires and ghosts and UFOs are real. They're not particularly real in life, but they're real on the screen. It's the communal aspect of movie-watching.
John Carpenter
#30. I made a decision back in 1978 that, in a trade off for money when I directed Halloween, I would have my name above the title in order to basically brand these movies my own.
John Carpenter
#31. I've gone through various periods with superheroes. They work in the right hands, but they don't work in other hands. It's tricky. But any movie is tricky. It's impossible to say, 'This is what you do in any situation.'
John Carpenter
#32. To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
John Carpenter
#33. I stopped directing in 2001 for four or five years, until I did the TV series 'Masters Of Horror.' I had been working steadily as a director since 1970. That's a long time. I was burned out.
John Carpenter
#34. Well, 'They Live' was a primal scream against Reaganism of the '80s. And the '80s never went away. They're still with us. That's what makes 'They Live' look so fresh - it's a document of greed and insanity. It's about life in the United States then and now. If anything, things have gotten worse.
John Carpenter
#35. John Carpenter created the idea of Halloween, so his vision remains the most focused and intelligently directed of the series. The directors that have followed have kept the original intent of the concept.
Donald Pleasence
#36. Remakes, in general, are a result of necessity being the mother of invention. They can't open movies consistently and break through the advertising clutter that's out there.
John Carpenter
#37. We all question our sanity. Everyone has had an experience of loss of control of something.
John Carpenter
#38. I love everything John Carpenter's ever done.
D.J. Cotrona
#39. Life goes on. The world spins out another day. The mystery of human life and hope goes on. And here and there, the luminous light that shone out from a carpenter in Nazareth glimmers and flickers in the darkness. And we hope again for what life might become. The soul waits.
John Ortberg
#40. One of my heroes is a composer named James Bernard, and oh my God ... I can still listen to his music today and be stirred and moved by it. But I think that you fall in love with ... Well, again, when you're young, it really is more powerful. Much more terrifying.
John Carpenter
#41. I had a talent for scoring films. I just developed it.
John Carpenter
#42. The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman.
John Carpenter
#43. Way back in the '70s, I was approached to talk about the story I'd write for a Spider-Man movie. They also talked to me about Batman. I had to think about it, but that was way, way back when.
John Carpenter
#44. Movies are pieces of film stuck together in a certain rhythm, an absolute beat, like a musical composition. The rhythm you create affects the audience.
John Carpenter
#45. There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.
John Carpenter
#46. In England, I'm a horror movie director. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In the US, I'm a bum.
John Carpenter
#47. If I had to pick one scary movie, I'd go with John Carpenter's 'The Thing.' That's probably number one.
Drew Goddard
#48. You play with everything you've got. I'm not a lover of cheap tricks. I've always loved playing with people, but there's no rule about it. You try everything you can.
John Carpenter
#50. I have got acquainted with Lofty John. Ilse is a great friend of his and often goes there to watch him working in his carpenter shop. He says he has made enough ladders to get to heaven without the priest but that is just his joke.
L.M. Montgomery
#51. Inspired teachers ... cannot be ordered by the gross from the factory. They must be discovered one by one, and brought home from the woods and swamps like orchids. They must be placed in a conservatory, not in a carpenter shop; and they must be honored and trusted.
John Jay Chapman
#52. To make movies you just have to want it enough. You have to have the passion for telling stories. You have to get by the love-of-movies aspect. You can't just be a movie fan.
John Carpenter
#53. I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I've been sometimes compared to those other guys. We're after different game.
David Cronenberg
#54. I like all of John Carpenter's movies. 'The Thing' is my favorite.
Rob Lowe
#55. Film buffs who don't live in Hollywood have a fantasy about what it's like to be a director. Movies and the people who make movies have such glamour associated with them. But the truth is, it's not like that. It's very different. It's hard work.
John Carpenter
#56. I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies. They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn't work out.
John Carpenter
#57. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes."
~Dr. Sam Loomis/Halloween
John Carpenter
#58. Clearly, the works of John Carpenter and Sam Raimi are front and center here. Argento is definitely there. But even stuff like the 'Friday the 13th' movies had quite an influence on me growing up.
Drew Goddard
#59. At the end of the first Halloween, when I shot 6 bullets into Michael Myers, John Carpenter said, Let's get a shot of you looking out of the window and seeing no one lying there.
Donald Pleasence
#60. Horror is a reaction; it's not a genre. Somebody's life would have to be in danger for it [story] to be a horror story.
John Carpenter
#61. I like serious films, the moneymaking blockbusters that don't make any kind of sense and John Carpenter films.
Pam Grier
#62. I'm always involved with casting my movies. I have final word on it.
John Carpenter
#63. I just aim for basketball season to start. I don't really care about anything else in life.
John Carpenter
#64. First of all, I was a wrestling fan when I was young. Even when I figured out what wrestling was, I was still a fan.
John Carpenter
#65. From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them, electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.
John Carpenter
#66. There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show-all are family.
John Kander
#67. He was leading those who risked their lives over that bridge in Selma, not Janice Joplin, Columbia University, or a labor union. It wasn't John Lennon that taught people about love and peaceful resistance - that job fell on the shoulders of a Jewish carpenter.
Glenn Beck
#68. I enjoyed 'The Avengers.' I couldn't do that kind of movie though. Superheroes aren't my deal.
John Carpenter
#69. As for action movies, I did Tarzan, and I'm also about to shoot Meltdown, which John Carpenter wrote.
Casper Van Dien
#70. Fears are all psychological. Being afraid of death, loss of a loved one and disfigurement are all powered by your mind, and that's very powerful stuff.
John Carpenter
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