Selected Quotes By Tim Burton
"Growing up in Burbank, there wasn’t much of a museum culture. I never visited one until I was a teenager (unless you count the Hollywood Wax Museum). I occupied my time going to see monster movies, watching tv, drawing, and playing in the local cemetery. Later, when I did start frequenting museums, I was struck by how similar the vibe was to the cemetery. Not in a morbid way, but both have a quiet, introspective, yet electrifying atmosphere. Excitement, mystery, discovery, life, and death all in one place."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Did you ever to think, maybe your not too big? Maybe this town's just to small?"
Tim Burton, Life
"roses are red, violets are blue. a clown killed a boy, and ate him up too."
Tim Burton, Kindness
"Disney and I were a bad mix. For a year I was probably more depressed than I have ever been in my life. I worked for a great animator, Glenn Kean. He was nice, he was good to me, he's a really strong animator and he helped me. But he also kind of tortured me because I got all the cute fox scenes to draw, and I couldn't draw all those four-legged Disney foxes. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't even fake the Disney style. Mine looked like road kills."
Tim Burton, Business
"Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"But then on meeting you, I felt I should be with you always."
Tim Burton, Love
"Alone and rejected, Mummy Boy wept, then went to the cabinet where the snack food was kept."
Tim Burton, Happiness
"I had seen other stop-motion animated features, and they were either not engaging or they're just too bizarre. There was one I liked when I was a kid called Mad Monster Party. People thought Nightmare was the first stop-motion animated monster musical, but that was."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"My dearest friend, if you don’t mind, I’d like to join you by your side. Where we could gaze into the stars, and sit together, now and forever. For it is plain as anyone can see, we’re simply meant to be."
Tim Burton, Friendship
"Unwisely, Santa offered a teddy bear to James, unaware he had been mauled by a grizzly earlier this year."
Tim Burton, Kindness
"Why would you want to go up there, when people are dying to get down here?"
Tim Burton, Life
"Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not necessarily in that order."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"And in that one grey hair I saw my whole life and I said "I think I need a hair."
Tim Burton, Life
"Robot Boy:
Mr. an Mrs. Smith had a wonderful life. They were a normal, happy husband and wife. One day they got news that made Mr. Smith glad. Mrs. Smith would would be a mom which would make him the dad! But something was wrong with their bundle of joy. It wasn't human at all, it was a robot boy! He wasn't warm and cuddly and he didn't have skin. Instead there was a cold, thin layer of tin. There were wires and tubes sticking out of his head. He just lay there and stared, not living or dead.
The only time he seemed alive at all was with a long extension cord plugged into the wall.
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."
The Smith's lives were now filled with misery and strife. Mrs. Smith hated her husband, and he hated his wife. He never forgave her unholy alliance: a sexual encounter with a kitchen appliance.
And Robot Boy grew to be a young man.
Though he was often mistaken for a garbage can.
Tim Burton, Love
"Can a heart break, once it's stopped beating?"
Tim Burton, Love
"Stick Boy liked Match Girl, he liked her a lot. He liked her cute figure, he thought she was hot."
Tim Burton, Love
"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."
Tim Burton, Kindness
"One of the things that we were trying to do with this show was the complexities of relationships and love. There is both passion and longing and a bittersweet quality to it that is a part of life."
Tim Burton, Love, Life
"Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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."
Tim Burton, Goals
"If you've 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."
Tim Burton, Happiness
"I wouldn't know a good script if it bit me in the face."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"And I Jack, the Pumpkin King, have grown so tired of the same old thing..."
Tim Burton, Life
"Half the fun is plan to plan."
Tim Burton, Planning
"They took a baseball bat and whacked open his head. Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes."
Tim Burton, Kindness
"My name is Jimmy, but my friends just call me the hideous penguin boy."
Tim Burton, Kindness
"I was never interested in what everybody else was interested in. I was very interiorized. I always felt kind of sad."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"For some of us, Halloween is everyday."
Tim Burton, Life
"People told me I couldn't kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice."
Tim Burton, Kindness
"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."
Tim Burton, Kindness
"I am not a dark person and I don't consider myself dark."
Tim Burton, Kindness
"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."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me."
Tim Burton, Happiness
“The Girl With Many Eyes:
One day in the park I had quite a surprise. I met a girl who had many eyes.
She was really quite pretty (and also quite shocking!) and I noticed she had a mouth, so we ended up talking.
We talked about flowers, and her poetry classes, and the problems she'd have if she ever wore glasses.
It's great to know a girl who has so many eyes, but you really get wet when she breaks down and cries.”
Tim Burton, Love
"I am the shadow on the moon at night/Filling your dreams to the brim with fright."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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."
Tim Burton, Freedom
Mad Matter: "Have I gone mad?" Alice: "I'm afraid so. You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are."
Tim Burton, Intelligence/Wisdom
“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.”
Tim Burton, Love
"Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"
Tim Burton, Goals
"We all know interspecies romance is weird."
Tim Burton, Love
"One person's craziness is another person's reality."