I’m trying to understand my life. The one that I’ve experienced.
OLIVER STONEI’d rather get past the tyranny of now, where you get judged for something based on what’s happening at the moment.
More Oliver Stone Quotes
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I went to Vietnam, and I was there for a long time. [Using marijuana] made the difference between staying human or, as Michael Douglas said, becoming a beast.
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I knew that one day I would come to this point that I would make something so outrageous and so ambitious that… it’d be that Don Quixote feeling, that I’d have to tilt at a windmill. Sometimes you’ve got to do it. That’s the only way you can do things.
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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.
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The past assumes the nature of the present.
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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.
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From ’45, the moment Franklin Roosevelt dies, we’re running ratlines with the Germans, helping Nazis escape.
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[Nixon] reduced the meaning of his life to nothing but power. In the film, we gave this sad figure consciousness of what he was. We weren’t right to do that – I don’t think he did have that consciousness. But we did it for movie reasons – to create empathy.
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I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken.
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I think our life is a series of adventures.
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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.
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writing = ass + chair
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Football is mesmerizing, because it’s a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they’re black or white, much as soldiers do.
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This myth that America has this atomic bomb that makes us right, it makes us good, it makes us set the agenda for the world. Everywhere, we can go global, we determine.
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I’ve changed my style constantly, so I’m not sure I have one defined style, except perhaps style of subject matter.
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I think a lot of people misunderstand what I’m doing, because my films are not easy sometimes. They do deserve a second viewing. I think they get misunderstood easily.
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I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.
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The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.
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You can never judge how the film will be taken; you can only make your best effort, and put out what you feel. How it’s read, you never can tell. Or remembered for that matter.
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I’m interested, I suppose, in tortured power.
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Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.
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I don’t want to make a half-assed film. It’s not my area of expertise.
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Horses are very difficult to shoot.
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When I make a new movie, I always get stuck with, “That’s not an Oliver Stone film.” But I don’t know what to do about that except just move on.
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Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize.
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I’m going to hold onto my Blu-ray collection because I really think it’s hardware and it’s important. I don’t want to live in a cloud, all my life.
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I study history in order to give an interpretation.
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