Timothy Walter Burton is an American film director, producer, writer, and artist. He is best known for his gothic fantasy and horror films such as Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Ed Wood (1994), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Frankenweenie (2012), the superhero films Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), the sci-fi film Planet of the Apes (2001), the musical adventure film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and the fantasy films Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016). These Tim Burton quotes will inspire you.
Best Tim Burton Quotes
- “Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?” ~ Tim Burton
- “One person’s craziness is another person’s reality.” ~ Tim Burton
- “Don’t worry about how you ‘should’ draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.” ~ Tim Burton
- “Live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself, am strange and unusual.” ~ Tim Burton
- “For me, fantasy has always been a means of exploring reality: it explores the fact that your internal life, your dreams and the weird images and the things that come to you are things that are actually important tools for dealing with real issues.” ~ Tim Burton
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“Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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
- “I like the challenge of doing things you know that you maybe shouldn’t do.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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
- “I grew up watching monster movies and horror movies, which I felt were like fairy tales and I think this always spoke to me. Something about that is symbolism – the beauty and the magic which helps me work with film and start making modern fairy tales.” ~ Tim Burton
- “If youve 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
- “When I was a kid I always wanted to be a mad scientist. I don’t know… a regular scientist just was no one.” ~ Tim Burton
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“Drawing is exercise for a restless imagination.” ~ Tim Burton
- “It’s great when you know somebody and they keep surprising you.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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
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“Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I’ve found that the people who play villains are the nicest people in the world and people who play heroes are jerks.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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
- “I’m a happy-go-lucky manic-depressive. It does get very deep and dark for me, and it gets scary at times when I feel I can’t pull out of it. But I don’t consider myself negative-negative. I’m positive-negative.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I feel any time you enter a dream world it’s like you’re working out things, it’s all inside your mind and you’re working it out, be it Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, or the kids in Narnia, they go through this weird journey that’s not real, and they’re going through this journey psychologically. It’s that journey of discovery, of getting oneself together, that fantasy and fairy tales are so good at. And while some people still look upon them as completely unrealistic, for me they’re more real than most things that are perceived as real.” ~ Tim Burton
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“I am the shadow on the moon at night/Filling your dreams to the brim with fright.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I think the thing is that you’re very affected by your early life, and I think that if you ever had that feeling of outsider, or loneliness or whatever, it just doesn’t leave you. You can be happy and successful, whatever, but I think that thing stays inside of you. It doesn’t ever really leave you. You kind of always will have that.” ~ Tim Burton
- “It’s good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.” ~ Tim Burton
- “Johnny Depp is somebody I really love working with because he doesn’t care how he looks. He wants to become weird characters and I like that.” ~ Tim Burton
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“Good morning starshine the earth says hello.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I never sort of really regret anything because you make your choices and I like to stand by them.” ~ Tim Burton
- “First of all, you make a movie that you want to see and then you just hope for the best.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don’t.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I don’t really dream, I space out during the day – that’s one of my problems wonder off when someone’s talking to me. I can’t remember any dreams in my life. There’s so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I’ve always been more comfortable making my decisions from the subconscious level, or more emotionally, because I find it is more truthful to me; Intellectually, I don’t think like that because I get uncomfortable.” ~ Tim Burton
- “You can learn a lot from children because they see things new every day. That’s the beauty of what you want to achieve as an artist – seeing things in a different way. Kids are constantly saying things that are funny and surprising and their observations are just… you know, they’re like little artists themselves.” ~ Tim Burton
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“Adults forget that kids are their own best censors.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I never really consider myself as a great artist. I just always like to draw.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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 further in.” ~ Tim Burton
- “People told me I couldn’t kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I always liked strange characters.” ~ Tim Burton
- “Some people get therapy, some people get to make movies.” ~ Tim Burton
- “Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that’s why we’re all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it’s actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.” ~ Tim Burton
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“I’m gonna go live in a cave, just completely live in my interior world.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I try not to go back in retrospect and say oh, I shouldn’t have done this or shouldn’t have done that. You make your decisions and you live by them.” ~ Tim Burton
- “If you want people to leave you alone then appearing to be crazy is a good thing. If you’re walking down the street talking to yourself people tend to give you a wide berth! But I’ve always been blessed with being easily ignored or avoided. I think maybe it’s because people think I look a little crazy.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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 Quotes
- “If you ever had a pet, with me it was a dog, with that sort of unconditional love that only dogs can give, people can’t do that; that sort of thing where it’s very powerful, it’s kind of your first love and your first real relationship, and usually your first experience with death.” ~ Tim Burton
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“The good thing about animation is that you can affect it. If something is not working, then you just fix it.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I was never interested in what everybody else was interested in. I was very interiorized. I always felt kind of sad.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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
- “You know, those kinds of things in your life…movies you try to work out your issues, then you realize those kinds of traumatic issues just stay with you forever and they just keep reoccurring, and no matter how hard I try to get them out of my head, they just sort of stay there.” ~ Tim Burton
- “There was one moment, and it happened in school. I had a big final exam – we were supposed to write a 20-page report on this book about Houdini. I probably would have loved reading it, but I didn’t, so I just decided to make a little super-8 movie based on it. I tied myself to the railroad tracks and all that. I mean, this is kid stuff, but it impressed the teacher, and I got an A. And that was maybe my first turning point, when I said, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t mind being a filmmaker.'” ~ Tim Burton
- “I’ve always liked monster movies and I’ve always been fascinated by – again, growing up in a culture where death was looked upon as a dark subject and living so close to Mexico where you see the Day of the Dead with the skeletons and it’s all humor and music and dancing and a celebration of life in a way. That always felt more of a positive approach to things. I think I always responded to that more than this dark, unspoken cloud in the environment I grew up in.” ~ Tim Burton
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“We all know interspecies romance is weird.” ~ Tim Burton
- “It’s very nice to have someone that you can have a completely abstract conversation with and leave the room, feel like everything’s fine, and then realize that if you pick it apart, you have absolutely no idea what either of you said.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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
- “The Boy with Nails in His Eyes put up his aluminum tree. It looked pretty strange because he couldn’t really see.” ~ Tim Burton
- “It’s always an interesting challenge to see if you can create a character that’s got emotion.” ~ Tim Burton
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“Half the fun is plan to plan” ~ Tim Burton
- “When we were growing up and saw a Ray Harryhausen movie, we were interested in how it was done. But thank God we got to go through the magic of seeing it before we knew how it was done. You were able to get this beautiful, pure, visceral response to something without knowing too much about it.” ~ Tim Burton
- “Even if you’re doing something that the studio sends you, or something that’s based on a book or story, at the end of it all, you try to make whatever it is your own. This is based on my love of horror movies. Everything is based on something, in some way.” ~ Tim Burton
- “There’s something about taking a classic movie that people love and doing another version of that, you’re setting yourself up for a mistake.” ~ Tim Burton
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“I wouldn’t know a good script if it bit me in the face.” ~ Tim Burton
- “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.” ~ Tim Burton
- “I worked at Disney many years ago. They just let me sit in a room for a couple of years and draw whatever I wanted to draw, so it’s a very personal thing to me. Drawing and everything you do there is something meaningful and personal.” ~ Tim Burton
- “Everything in this room is edible. Even I’m edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.” ~ Tim Burton
- “My diagnosis,” he said “for better or worse, is that your son is the result of an old pharaoh’s curse.” ~ Tim Burton
