I never really got nightmares from movies. I was much more terrified by my own family and real life, you know? - Tim Burton

It’s good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way. It’s like weird, twisted poetry, the way kids perceive things. And quite beautiful sometimes. They kind of blow your mind and ground you at the same time

People say, “Monster movies—they’re all fantasy.” Well, fantasy isn’t fantasy—it’s reality if it connects to you. It’s like a dream. You have a nightmare, and it’s got all this crazy imagery, but it’s real. You wake up in a cold sweat, freaking out. That’s completely real. So I always found that those people trying to categorize normal versus abnormal or light versus dark, yada yada, are all missing the point.

In movies you kind of work out your issues, but then you realize, those kind of traumatic issues stay with you forever so somehow they kind of keep reoccurring, no matter how hard I try to get them out of my head they sort of stay there.