49 Iconic Cinema Quotes

Movies have a magical way of leaving lasting impressions on audiences, and nothing quite captures the essence of a film like a memorable quote. Whether it’s a line that evokes deep emotion, sparks a sense of adventure, or delivers a punch of humor, iconic cinema quotes have etched their way into our cultural consciousness. In this curated collection, we explore 49 of the most unforgettable lines in movie history, each carrying the power to transport us back to the time we first experienced them on the big screen. Join us as we revisit those classic moments, relive their impact, and explore the timeless influence they continue to have on storytelling and beyond.

1. “There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life. ” - Fellini

2. “There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón” - Mitch Glazer

3. “I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.” - D.W. Griffith

4. “Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out” - Martin Scorsese

5. “Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!” - Derek Jarman

6. “Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.” - Roger Zelazny

7. “In my experience there are billions of dollars available for pieces of shit. As soon as the material distinguishes itself by something interesting, financing becomes a problem.” - Rutger Hauer

8. “But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.” - François Truffaut

9. “Hollywood's Studio Era was part of a Golden Age because it didn't need profanity (unlike reality-television today)” - Manny Pacheco

10. “Today, I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.” - François Truffaut

11. “When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part.What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?” - Andrei Tarkovsky

12. “That was horrible. Horrible. That poor little guy."Pex was unrepentant. "Yeah, well, he asked for it. Calling us ... all those things."But---buried alive! That's like in that horror movie. Y'know -- the one with all the horror."I think I saw that one. With all the words going up on the screen at the end?"Yeah, that was it. Tell you the truth, those words kinda ruined it for me.” - Eoin Colfer

13. “I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)” - Martin Amis

14. “What’s a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.” - Robert Altman

15. “My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films.” - Woody Allen

16. “The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.''Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position.'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")” - David J. Schow

17. “Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy.” - Bjork

18. “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.” - André Bazin

19. “Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.” - Robert Bresson

20. “Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc...) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create” - Robert Bresson

21. “The cinema is an invention without any future.” - Louis Lumière

22. “Ugarte: You despise me, don't you?Rick: If I gave you any thought I probably would.” - Julius J. Epstein

23. “Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice...it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous...” - J. Michael Straczynski

24. “We didn't need sex. We had Tyrone Power.” - Barbara Cartland

25. “For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.” - Virginia Woolf

26. “The projector's beam lay warm on Walt's neck, and he knew they'd all been plucked from danger and love, from another time, another place, and set back into this dark, sticky-floored theater, in the heart of nothing much that mattered.” - Alan Heathcock

27. “The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances [...].” - Gilles Deleuze

28. “R means under 18 accompanied by an adult. Therefore all corporately funded films in the US must be made with the concept that those under the age of 18 are able to view the film. This means all corporately funded films in the US are made for the eyes of children.” - Crispin H. Glover

29. “Micky was a hard taskmaster. He could be very unkind. He was out to judge people, I think pretty quickly, and once he’d made a decision, he never altered it. If he didn’t like you for one reason or another, it was best to leave. On the other hand, with the people he liked and respected, he was wonderful and was very loyal. He was one of those people who liked to be challenged. He liked people to stand up to him, and most people ran away.” - Christopher Challis

30. “I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.” - Kim Ki-duk

31. “Do you know anything about silent films?" "Sure," I said. "The first ones were developed in the late nineteenth century and sometimes had live musical accompaniment, though it wasn't until the 1920s that sound became truly incorporated into films, eventually making silent ones obsolete in cinema.” - Richelle Mead

32. “I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available.” - Christopher Hitchens

33. “The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.” - Ed McBain

34. “I might have remembered what my father once wrote to Henry George, "I never do anything by halves, and am half hearted in no cause that I embrace.” - Cecil B. DeMille

35. “No visām mākslām un izklaidēšanās veidiem visvairāk apstrīdētā ir filma.” - Anšlavs Eglītis

36. “Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!' Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn")” - Cornell Woolrich

37. “Expanded cinema isn't a movie at all: like life it's a process of becoming.” - Gene Youngblood

38. “THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA(1929) the 'honesty' of documentary as compared with fiction film, the 'perfection' of the cinematic eye compared with human eye.” - Steven Jay Schneider

39. “In New York I'd go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I've upped it to six or seven, mainly because I'm too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It's not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it's just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we've agreed to lower the bar.” - David Sedaris

40. “The angel said, "I like black-and-white films more than color because they're more artificial. You have to work harder to overcome your disbelief. It's sort of like prayer.” - Jonathan Carroll

41. “An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.” - Federico Fellini

42. “Tony Williams: You’ve often mentioned that Tales of Hoffmann (1951) has been a major influence on you.George Romero: It was the first film I got completely involved with. An aunt and uncle took me to see it in downtown Manhattan when it first played. And that was an event for me since I was about eleven at the time. The imagery just blew me away completely. I wanted to go and see a Tarzan movie but my aunt and uncle said, “No! Come and see a bit of culture here.” So I thought I was missing out. But I really fell in love with the film. There used to be a television show in New York called Million Dollar Movie. They would show the same film twice a day on weekdays, three times on Saturday, and three-to-four times on Sunday. Tales of Hoffmann appeared on it one week. I missed the first couple of days because I wasn’t aware that it was on. But the moment I found it was on, I watched virtually every telecast. This was before the days of video so, naturally, I couldn’t tape it. Those were the days you had to rent 16mm prints of any film. Most cities of any size had rental services and you could rent a surprising number of films. So once I started to look at Tales of Hoffmann I realized how much stuff Michael Powell did in the camera. Powell was so innovative in his technique. But it was also transparent so I could see how he achieved certain effects such as his use of an overprint in the scene of the ballet dancer on the lily ponds. I was beginning to understand how adept a director can be. But, aside from that, the imagery was superb. Robert Helpmann is the greatest Dracula that ever was. Those eyes were compelling. I was impressed by the way Powell shot Helpmann sweeping around in his cape and craning down over the balcony in the tavern. I felt the film was so unique compared to most of the things we were seeing in American cinema such as the westerns and other dreadful stuff I used to watch. Tales of Hoffmann just took me into another world in terms of its innovative cinematic technique. So it really got me going.Tony Williams: A really beautiful print exists on laserdisc with commentary by Martin Scorsese and others.George Romero: I was invited to collaborate on the commentary by Marty. Pat Buba (Tony’s brother) knew Thelma Schoonmaker and I got to meet Powell in later years. We had a wonderful dinner with him one evening. What an amazing guy! Eventually I got to see more of his movies that I’d never seen before such as I Know Where I’m Going and A Canterbury Tale. Anyway, I couldn’t do the commentary on Tales of Hoffmann with Marty. But, back in the old days in New York, Marty and I were the only two people who would rent a 16mm copy of the film. Every time I found it was out I knew that he had it and each time he wanted it he knew who had it! So that made us buddies.” - George A. Romero

43. “For the casual viewer, Kurosawa’s films can be an exercise in endurance.” - Jerry White

44. “MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub!AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh.MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow.AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me, I palpitate!” - Angela Carter

45. “I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.” - David Foster Wallace

46. “Otak itu utuh. Otak itu layar. Saya tak percaya jika linguistik dan psikoanalisa menawarkan sesuatu yang berarti untuk sinema. Berbeda halnya dengan apa yang ditawarkan biologi otak --biologi molekular. Pikiran itu molekular. Kecepatan-kecepatan molekularlah yang mampu membuat kita mengatasi betapa lambatnya kita (tubuh) merespon. Tepatnya adalah karena sinema membekerjakan imaji di dalam gerak, atau gerak-auto, dengan demikian sinema tak pernah berhenti melacak sirkuit-sirkuit otak". Deleuze: The Brain is The Screen, An Interview” - Deleuze

47. “Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, madam. And one can't be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are. - Agrado from "Todo Sobre Mi Madre” - Pedro Almodóvar

48. “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre” - Pedro Almodóvar

49. “Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.” - Werner Herzog