Kevin smith quotes

There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel, it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero, where there's no expectations, and that's where I like to be.

I didn't get into film to win Academy Awards. I wanted to have a conversation with the audience.

I really would love to play a hannibal lector or PSYCO type character.

Why take life seriously? No one gets out alive anyways.

Whenever I'm not shooting, I'm in the editing room with my footage. While the crew is taking 15 minutes to an hour to set up the next shot, I'm behind the Avid, putting the flick together.

Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.

With what you don't know about me, I could just about fill the Grand Canyon.

I always wanted to see if I could sell a movie to the public without doing any marketing because my philosophy was like, 'Hey man, I'm reaching my audience everyday. I'm twittering with them. I'm in direct contact with them on the podcast.'

When are you people going to learn? It's not about who's right or wrong. No denomination's nailed it yet, because they're all too self-righteous to realize that it doesn't matter what you have faith in, just that you have faith. Your hearts are in the right place, but your brains need to wake up. I have issues with anyone who treats faith as a burden instead of a blessing. You people don't celebrate your faith; you mourn it.

It's too expensive, that's the thing nobody wants to talk about. It is too expensive to make movies. That's not true, it is too expensive to market movies. Making movies is not.

I say what other people won't.

Why do my movies make people feel so dead inside?

Based on the timely and helpful responses to my support issues, I feel that I made the right decision to become a customer earlier this year. LuxSci is definitely a quality, customer-oriented business.

In the face of such hopelessness as our eventual, unavoidable death, there is little sense in not at least trying to accomplish all of your wildest dreams in life.

Sometimes the path you're on is not as important as the direction you're heading.

People like to set the bar high. I like to put the bar on the ground and barely step over it. I like to keep the expectations really low.

It's like a dream come true. When somebody is paying you to talk about yourself, you've won.

I feel like if you're in Jersey, you have to be a Jersey Devils fan. Anybody born within the confines of the border of the state of New Jersey, I feel, should be a Jersey Devils fan.

This is not an industry in which you curl up in a ball and shy away from the realities. It's a time to scream to the clouds that we're here and we've got great values and great prices. What better time to do that than the Super Bowl?

You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude, but they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you.

One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.

It's not like someday my kid's gonna be standing over my grave, and somebody's gonna hang her a folded flag and say, "You know what? This is 'cause he did 24 hours straight on Twitter." But it's just one of those little personal victories, like, "I wonder if I can do this." And I did it. A stupid goal, but I accomplished it. Life's all about...for me, at least...having very stupid achievable goals. That way, you always feel like a winner.

I saw Richard Linklater's film 'Slacker' for my twenty-first birthday. That was the moment when it all seemed possible. This guy gave me hope.

It takes nothing to encourage an artist.

I'm not even supposed to be here today.

In this life, if you don't celebrate yourself, nobody will.

Don't go where the puck's been; go where it's gonna be

I grew up in a pretty gay world - my brother's gay and he's been married to a man for 20 years, which is like 60 in straight-people years.

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.

Any book is a self-help guide if you can take something from it.

Long time no see. I only pray the caliber of your questions has improved.

Indie film isn’t dead. It just grew up.

It's taken me 15 years to step behind a camera and make something everyone agrees looks like a movie.

In my spare time, I smoke acres of weed.

If you grow up fat, you have to try harder.

I know you're supposed to tell kids not to do drugs, but, kids, do it! Do weed! Don't do the other stuff, but weed is good

Im gonna try to pay for CLERKS III myself. As much as I love the crowd-funding model, thats an advancement in indie film that belongs to the next generation of artists. I started on my own dime, and if Im allowed, I should finish on my own dime.

I wanted to get my movie noticed WITHOUT spending any ad money. So I made a bit of a spectacle. I recorded lots of podcasts. I bickered with hate groups. I criticized critics. I banged pots together. I did everything I could to raise awareness without raising any money to do so.

Generally, I wake up, honestly it's creepy, but I wake up around 4:20.

Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.

I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.

Storytelling is my currency. It's my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out.

More often than not, a hero’s most epic battle is the one you never see; it’s the battle that goes on within him or herself.

Live a "Why not?" life, man. Take the shot. The shot is always worth taking.

If you're lucky, you go from being a movie fan to a movie maker.

If you're alive, kick into drive. Chase whimsies. See if you can turn dreams into a way to make a living, if not an entire way of life.

If there was no Internet, my career would have ended in 1995.

Everybody's got one killer story. It doesn't take talent to tell that story, it just takes experience.

My Father taught me to weigh my words carefully, and speak up only when I had something insightful to add to the proceedings, or something really funny to say. He also taught me that if I couldn’t be that kind of guy in real life, that I could earn a healthy living pretending to be that guy in the movies – particularly when paired up with a long haired stoner.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment.

In Hollywood you kind of fail upwards

Haven't two hundred years of failed missionary work overseas taught anybody anything? You can't convert people to anything - whether religion, or something as inane as our flicks.

I sympathize far more with heavier people than I ever will with thin. I'll never be thin. Let's be honest.

Other filmmakers make their movies and put them out and that's that. For me, for some odd reason, it goes deeper than that.

I liked hockey, and I still like hockey.

People always ask me if I hate the nuns. Do I make my movies extra dirty to piss them off? I always say no, that's not the point. To a Catholic, a movie is only dirty if it makes you want to have sex more. If it makes you feel sick, disgusted, ashamed of your own body, then it's not a dirty movie at all. It's a Catholic movie. And I make very Catholic movies.

I just love movies, so suddenly, you’re political about movies, and that’s dark. It’s just not fun when something you love becomes calculated.

I made a deal with myself that whenever I smoke weed, I have to be doing something productive: writing, recording, cutting a podcast, editing, etc.

You can have 10 bucks to 10 million bucks and if you got a crew, imagination and a lot of people willing to turn in some work next to nothing, you going to have a feature. But you can't get beyond how expensive marketing the movie is, it's so crushing.

Stop…stop, that’s the next generation of fans… How dare you pass judgment on those 12-year-old girls who like vampires! They need to be encouraged because in six years they’ll be 18-year-old girls who like vampires and are into all sorts of goth-permissive and whatnot. Don’t Poo-poo it. There’s a plan, and it’s working.

I'm always cribbing from real life. I'm not a very creative filmmaker.

I'd see movies, comedies, and I loved 'Animal House', I loved all the John Hughes stuff, but I never saw me and my friends totally represented.

Keep your focus on what YOU want to do - not what anyone else wants or is doing. You lose time watching others succeed.

People have been telling me I'm a failure and that I'm doing it all wrong for 20 years now. Never trust anybody when they tell you how your story goes. You know your story. You write your own story.

Don't be afraid to do weird stuff, so long as you do it cheaply and cover everyone's bets. Be bold. Be stupid, if you have to: so long as you don't hurt anybody, what's it matter how dopey your dream is? If I hadn't made TUSK? If I'd let it die as a podcast? I wouldn't have three other movies I'm now making within the span of a year. Some folks will try to shame you for trying something outside the norm; the only shame is in not trying to accomplish your dreams.

My Father taught me how to be a man – and not by instilling in me a sense of machismo or an agenda of dominance. He taught me that a real man doesn’t take, he gives; he doesn’t use force, he uses logic; doesn’t play the role of trouble-maker, but rather, trouble-shooter; and most importantly, a real man is defined by what’s in his heart, not his pants.

I try never to worry in general. Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due.

Don't let anybody tell you different, man: The main goal in life careerwise should always be to try to get paid to simply be yourself.

My job is to say, 'This is how I see the world. Do you agree?'

People tend to romanticize this job. So, it's fun to let the air out of it.

Is man, indeed, a walrus at heart?

It's silly that anyone in this world tells you that there are only certain people that can marry you.

The writer crafts their ideal world. In my world, everyone has really long conversations or just picks apart pop culture to death and everyone talks in monologue.

So often, over the course of our day-to-days, we forget the details of what shapes us most in life. Sure, we'll pay through the nose to have our weddings videotaped, but can we say the same thing about the first time we discovered masturbation, or the moment we realized that the true nature of the opposite sex is to lie and humiliate (and I'm not just talking about women here)? Usually not.

All these people who say success changes people; well, no, it just magnifies what's there.

Failure is success training.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

For years, my job was to make the movie inexpensively. And I could bring it in. What I can't control are the costs of marketing.

There's a trick to being whatever you want to be in life. It starts with the simple belief that you are what or who you say you are.

We love dirty oral on the Down Low, but no going steady.

AZRAEL: No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater... than central air.

One of the reasons I always looked up to [George] Carlin is he looked like your grandfather but, acted like your best friend. Most of the adults in my world were adults and acted like adults and had job-type jobs and bills and pressures and stopped playing a long time ago. And George Carlin was a guy that the more he aged the younger he seemed. It was odd because he was still sagely and wise. But he was such a role model for me.

And George Carlin was a guy that the more he aged the younger he seemed.

People are bursting out of the closet, rejecting their parents' wishes to keep the faith. Atheism is becoming mainstream.

So I know how I watch movies which is on my laptop, man. And that's how I suspect a lot of people do it.

There was never any down side to casting friends over professionals. It was always fun seeing folks who never performed before stretching their wings.

I know what it feels like to carry a lot of weight in a society that's very image-conscious. It's a thin person's world, and we try to navigate within it without being made fun of.

T-shirts and long pants make me easier to find in a crowd, but also easy to disappear in a crowd because if I am wearing this and suddenly I am not, it's like a Harry Potter invisibility cloak.

Stoners are cute; junkies are sad.

Dudes know I'm not a threat. Chicks know I'm not a threat.