Top 30 Tim Burton Quotes

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.’

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.

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.

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

Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.

One person’s crazyness is another person’s reality.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I’d said, ‘I’m going to be a director,’ it probably wouldn’t have happened.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 like people who play villains work out all their problems on screen, and then they’re just really wonderful people.

When people are deprived of a sense, their other senses get heightened. If you’re culturally devoid of something – of weather, of artistry, of interesting architecture, all the way down the line to culture itself – you’re either forced to give in and get that car dealership, or you manufacture those things for yourself.

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.

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

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