Gilliamesque Quotes

“Necessity might be the mother of invention, but restriction is the mother of efficiency.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

“It’s as if the future is coming to us faster than we are heading to it. I think it was the author William Gibson who suggested that global stocks of cognitive dissonance are currently so high they threaten to make the traditional idea of science fiction redundant. And once you reach my age, you tend to find that the individual days become really long, but the years get shorter, which only distorts your temporal perspective still further.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

“One of the many funny things about comic books is that the Catholic Church invented them. I discovered this in Rome when I saw the way they used to have the texts the priest would read from unfurling over the lectern – almost like a scroll – with a series of ornate illustrations across the bottom, upside down on the page, but the right way up for the illiterate church-goers (which was most of them), who could then follow the action in pictorial form while the man in the dress chuntered on in Latin.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

“Cynicism can often be a way of covering up one’s own inability to do great deeds.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

“It’s much easier not to sell your soul when no one wants to buy it, and I’ve always been afraid my resolve might weaken if I ever gave it a chance.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

“When you’ve only got thirty-six Kodachromes in a roll, all the photos have to be considered, not like that digital shit where you can just keep hammering it.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

“the past always being easier to cling on to, whereas the future can only be understood once it’s actually happening.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

“that’s probably why I had to go into film-making – to acquire the deep emotional and spiritual wounds which my shockingly happy childhood had so callously denied me.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

“An ambivalence about the relationship between the rural and the urban has been a major underlying theme of the films I’ve made. On the one hand, I love cities for their architecture and as hothouses of culture and art. On the other, I hate them as man-made excrescences conspiring to obscure our view of the natural world.”
― Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir