M. Night Shyamalan Quotes

Giving should be a part of your routine, just like working out, eating, and sleeping.

You don't get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can't.

Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.

When you say fear of the unknown, that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and its genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because were not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.

My biggest fear in life is to be average.

Is it possible that there are no coincidences?

When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.

I find it very eerie when somebody is being really polite.

There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It's something that I'm very careful about, that I'm just leaning too hard into something.

Sometimes we do not do things that we wish to do, so others will not know that we wish to do them.

There are a lot of things I can take, and a few that I can't. What I can't take is when my older brother, who's everything that I want to be, starts losing faith in things. I saw that look in your eyes last night. I don't ever want to see that look in your eyes again.

People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance.

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.

When you find your voice, your life takes on grace.

For instance, The Sixth Sense had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.

A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what's going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors.

My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.

I love 'The Killing', I love 'Homeland' and 'Mad Men', all those shows that lean into the tone of things.

My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.

Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.

I'm so from the Woody Allen/Spike Lee school.

Great actors come with depth about how their character sees the world, and they completely defend it. They could defend it in a court of law, down to the reason the patient deserved this.

I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.

I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they're A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.

I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.

As a child, I probably knew phrases that other children didn't known, like "pitocin drip" or "myocardial infarction." Some kind of knowledge was always in the air. My parents would always talk about science at the dinner table, saying something about this patient or some other patient. So I guess for a nanosecond in early high school, I thought about going into medicine.

I wouldn't describe myself as a do-gooder. That's really more my wife. I'm kind of just the obsessed guy who's been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it.

See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky?

Each of the actors need to have their justification for saying something awful. You want everyone to have a positive and negative thing. Even a positive thing needs to have darkness in it. It needs to have depth.

You're never the same. You're degrading, or you're getting better. You don't stay the same.

'The Last Airbender' is genetically engineered for me. I love martial arts. I study it. The movie's based on a lot of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. I was raised Hindu.

I knew the moment it happened, it was a miracle. I could have been kissing her when she threw up. It would have scarred me for life. I may never have recovered.

The beauty is that we can blur film and TV a little bit more.

You don't want to watch classics with me 'cause I'm constantly writing notes.

I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it's an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that's my trademark or one of them anyway!

Most of the time, I don't watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That's my classroom.

People who come to see my movies, you're coming to see a drama masquerading as a genre piece.

I had a desire to do TV and wanted to get in, in the right way, knowing that I was going to learn a lot, along the way.

I consider myself an independent filmmaker.

I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.

I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.

The whole world makes comic book movies now.

I want to make a bunch of small movies. I'm really interested in that for me in the future.

Anime is intended to have ambiguous features. That's part of the art form.

The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.

Filmmakers have to find the right materials to match their [voice].

I always thought I was going to be the film guy until I died.

I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.

Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.

I've been asked to direct pilots for a lot of shows.