Oliver Stone quotes
Born
September 15, 1946, New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation
Director, screenwriter.
Oliver Stone is an American director and screenwriter.
One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.
– Oliver Stone
I study history in order to give an interpretation.
– Oliver Stone
When you look at a movie, you look at a director’s thought process.
– Oliver Stone
I will come out with my interpretation. If I’m wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.
– Oliver Stone
It’s interesting that when economic times were the hardest, that’s when many people embraced liberalism.
– Oliver Stone
Well, George W.Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. It’s an ideological thing.
– Oliver Stone
I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.
– Oliver Stone
There’s an electrical thing about movies.
– Oliver Stone
Lunch is for wimps.
– Oliver Stone
I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.
– Oliver Stone
Anybody who’s been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they’ve thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn’t that major.
– Oliver Stone
I do believe that movies are subject to a million interpretations.
– Oliver Stone
I’ve been to war, and it’s not easy to kill. It’s bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.
– Oliver Stone
– Oliver Stone
Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.
– Oliver Stone
Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them – maybe that’s what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.
– Oliver Stone
I’d love to do historical pictures more, but I don’t know if I can.
– Oliver Stone
The past assumes the nature of the present.
– Oliver Stone
When I was a child, I’d see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it.
– Oliver Stone
Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.
– Oliver Stone
But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.
– Oliver Stone
Hell is the impossibility of reason.
– Oliver Stone
I’ve changed my style constantly, so I’m not sure I have one defined style, except perhaps style of subject matter.
– Oliver Stone
The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I’m doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.
– Oliver Stone
You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It’s hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that’s great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we’ll see.
– Oliver Stone
There was a certain faction in America that had always been pro-Nazi, including the Allen Dulles people. These were businessmen, Wall Street men.
– Oliver Stone
Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.
– Oliver Stone
Independence is a state of mind. Independence is spirit without category.
– Oliver Stone
I like automatic weapons. I fought for my right to use them in Vietnam.
– Oliver Stone
A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she’ll appear in film and it won’t work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don’t know.
– Oliver Stone
I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It’s my responsibility to find the research. It’s my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation.
– Oliver Stone
I’m terrible at horror movies, by the way. I get scared so easily.
– Oliver Stone
JFK was leading the world, leading the United States into a new position with the Soviet Union. He was calling for the end of the Cold War. He would have been reelected in 1964 because he was vastly popular.
– Oliver Stone
You’re not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.
– Oliver Stone
What needs to happen is more of a global understanding, and I believe the United States can work as a global partner and not be the hegemon.
– Oliver Stone
One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.
– Oliver Stone
I’ve met people who will go to a movie that I can’t stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There’s something they like and identified in that movie, and I don’t see it.
– Oliver Stone
I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.
– Oliver Stone
Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.
– Oliver Stone