Literary Birthday – 9 October – Guillermo del Toro

Happy Birthday, Guillermo del Toro, born 9 October 1964.

Quotes

1. The point of being over 40 is to fulfil the desires you’ve been harbouring since you were 7.
2. I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen.
3. Power revealed is power sacrificed. The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable.
4. There is beautiful in the grotesque.
5. Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait… We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple…when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us.
6. In the end, perfection is just a concept – an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.
7. If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer… We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.
8. The only thing you can do as an artist is to come to the world, see what no one is doing, and leave behind one or two things that wouldn’t have happened without you.
9. Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge—the abyss.
10. But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil’s Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more Gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
11. Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness.
12. You have to believe the magic to see it.

Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican film director, screenwriter, producer, and novelist. Del Toro’s film credits include The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Pacific Rim. His novels include The Strain, The Night Eternal, The Fall, and The Monsters of Hellboy II.

Source for image: GuillemMedina, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guillermo_del_Toro_in_2017.jpg

Source for quotes

 by Amanda Patterson

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