Guillermo del Toro Quotes

it is easy to starve, but it is difficult to stoop.

I always have this image of a woman running across a desert carrying children, trying to find water and food, not knowing when they'll get that. And her feet are slashed up from the dry, hard earth... Even when I'm uncomfortable, sometimes in pain, or just cold... I think, 'Thank God for what I've got.'

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

I know that I'm very lucky to be alive. For 35 or 40 years I've spilt my blood and broke my bones and spent years in hospitals.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

I had spent many days hungry; had slept on railway stations at times because I did not have money to pay for a hotel room... there were moments when I felt I had compromised my dignity as a human being and as an actor.

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don't just succumb.

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I'm going to be pretty strong until I die.

How many times can a man go down and still be alive?

When you've fallen on the highway / and you're lying in the rain, / and they ask you how you're doing / of course you'll say you can't complain.

I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with a few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing...You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.

Sometimes survival is the worst alternative there is

I've been beaten, I've been bruised, I was left for dead as well.

My philosophy is: if you don't bear a cross, you can't wear a crown so you gotta go through some form of humiliation to reach tribulation.

What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?

Trouble and pain were what kept a man alive. Or trying to avoid trouble and pain. It was a full time job.

The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.

To live is to fight. We just fight in different arenas.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

Growing up, my family was an enemy of the state. I have experienced more disappointment than joy, much more sad stories or desperate conditions.