My reputation has grown slowly.

It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be.

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

Art consists of reshaping life, but it does not create life nor cause life.

The screen is a magic medium.

Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.

You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity -- no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours.

Here's to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it's caused me.

When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination.

A film is -- or should be -- more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later?
Stanley Kubrick.

Take a stress pill and think things over -- HAL in 2001.