Tim Burton Quotes

One person's craziness is another person's reality.

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

Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.

Don't worry about how you 'should' draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.

Live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself, am strange and unusual.

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.

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.

If youve 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.

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

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.

Drawing is exercise for a restless imagination.

I am the shadow on the moon at night/Filling your dreams to the brim with fright.

I grew up watching monster movies and horror movies, which I felt were like fairy tales and I think this always spoke to me. Something about that is symbolism - the beauty and the magic which helps me work with film and start making modern fairy tales.

I feel any time you enter a dream world it's like you're working out things, it's all inside your mind and you're working it out, be it Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, or the kids in Narnia, they go through this weird journey that's not real, and they're going through this journey psychologically. It's that journey of discovery, of getting onself together, that fantasy and fairy tales are so good at. And while some people still look upon them as completely unrealistic, for me they're more real than most things that are perceived as real.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There was one moment, and it happened in school. I had a big final exam - we were supposed to write a 20-page report on this book about Houdini. I probably would have loved reading it, but I didn't, so I just decided to make a little super-8 movie based on it. I tied myself to the railroad tracks and all that. I mean, this is kid stuff, but it impressed the teacher, and I got an A. And that was maybe my first turning point, when I said, 'Yeah, I wouldn't mind being a filmmaker.'

I think the thing is that you're very affected by your early life, and I think that if you ever had that feeling of outsider, or loneliness or whatever, it just doesn't leave you. You can be happy and successful, whatever, but I think that thing stays inside of you. It doesn't ever really leave you. You kind of always will have that.

I always liked strange characters.

Voodoo Girl Her skin is white cloth, and she's all sewn apart and she has many colored pins sticking out of her heart. She has many different zombies who are deeply in her trance. She even has a zombie who was originally from France. 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 farther in.

I was never interested in what everybody else was interested in. I was very interiorized. I always felt kind of sad.

If you want people to leave you alone then appearing to be crazy is a good thing. If you're walking down the street talking to yourself people tend to give you a wide berth! But I've always been blessed with being easily ignored or avoided. I think maybe it's because people think I look a little crazy.

The Boy with Nails in His Eyes put up his aluminum tree. It looked pretty strange because he couldn't really see.

Some people get therapy, some people get to make movies.

Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.

Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor, What have you done to my boy? He's not flesh and blood, he's aluminum alloy!" The doctor said gently, What I'm going to say will sound pretty wild. But you're not the father of this strange looking child. You see, there still is some question about the child's gender, but we think that its father is a microwave blender.

I like the challenge of doing things you know that you maybe shouldn't do.

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.

And I Jack, the Pumpkin King, have grown so tired of the same old thing.

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.

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.

I'm gonna go live in a cave, just completely live in my interior world.

It's great when you know somebody and they keep surprising you.

We all know interspecies romance is weird.

[Childbirth] is the weirdest thing I've ever seen. It's like an 'Alien' movie. I started crying, it was so emotional ... I was there in the room but I wasn't planning on doing much. But then I see this blue pinhead come out and I think I said to the nurse, 'What the hell is that?' And then it turns into this round red thing in seconds. It's just shocking.

I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don't.

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.

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'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.

I've always liked monster movies and I've always been fascinated by - again, growing up in a culture where death was looked upon as a dark subject and living so close to Mexico where you see the Day of the Dead with the skeletons and it's all humor and music and dancing and a celebration of life in a way. That always felt more of a positive approach to things. I think I always responded to that more than this dark, unspoken cloud in the environment I grew up in.

There's something about taking a classic movie that people love and doing another version of that, you're setting yourself up for a mistake.

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.

I've found that the people who play villains are the nicest people in the world and people who play heroes are jerks.

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.

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.