Explore Quotes by James Gunn

I've come to trust that what I like is what works.

My girlfriend says I have frontal-lobe epilepsy. I have visions. They have slowed down as I've gotten older, but I still have them.

I wrote a 20-page document, before I was ever hired, on exactly how the visuals of 'Guardians of the Galaxy' would be approached, how we'd look at creating a new type of space epic. That's exactly what the movie is today - absolutely everybody has adhered to that original document.

Honest to God, for me, I've never been a guy to stack projects. A lot of these other guys, they like to do this and then line up what they're doing next and line up what they're doing next. I just can't do it.

Getting so much attention all at once, with so many people who want something from you or want to talk to you... for someone who is overly sensitive to other people's needs, that can be difficult.

By isolating the issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, climate change, environment, governance, economics, catastrophe and whatever other problems the present embodies or the future may bring, science fiction can do what Dickens and Sinclair did: make real the consequences of social injustice or human folly.

Science fiction writers aren't in the prediction business; they're in the speculation business, using 'hasn't happened' or 'hasn't happened yet' to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities.

I think that one of the things that drives me in telling stories, and art in general, is finding the beautiful in a big mass of ugly.

Comics were not something that as a young kid you could say you were into in Manchester, Missouri. Kids did not read comic books back then.

When people go to the theater, people say they want something different, but what they really want is something the same with slight permutations. To really not know what is going to happen next is a hard thing.

One of the things that we've tried to do with the 'Guardians' films is to allow the women to be full characters.

'Belko Experiment' was the harshest, most extreme movie I ever made. But I still think there's a very cohesive center to it that wasn't always in my early films. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I think it's a commercial thing.

I think of the Avengers as The Beatles, and the Guardians are the Rolling Stones. That is really how I feel about the groups.

In a way, metafiction breaks down the story and makes it less real. But in another respect, by that very breaking down, it actually makes things feel more real than they would to begin with.

I would say the main thing is, don't just copy yourself, which is what a lot of sequels do. And in some cases, it works. Like James Bond movies. But James Bond is a different type of character.

One rule of invention: before you can invent it, you have to imagine it.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

The zombie is in a lot of ways the perfect horror movie bad guy. It plays on so many fears all at once. The fear of predators, the fear of disease and the fear of loved ones betraying us - the ones we care about are turning around and trying to eat us.

It also is true that some ideas naturally work themselves out over a longer period of time than a single human life can encompass.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

I love Groot so much I get teary eyed when I think of him sometimes. Essentially, all the Guardians start out the movie as bastards - except Groot. He’s an innocent. He’s a hundred percent deadly and a hundred percent sweet. He’s caught up in Rocket’s life, really.