All Quotes

"Paul Winfield – Lieutenant Ed Traxler"

"Lance Henriksen – Detective Hal Vukovich"

"Bess Motta – Ginger Ventura"

"Earl Boen – Dr. Peter Silberman"

"Danny Cooksey – Tim"

"Before rock and roll , Before diet soda , Before designer jeans , running shoes and video games… One boy had a vision of what was to come — because he had just been there."

"Michael J. Fox — Marty McFly"

"Christopher Lloyd — Doc Brown"

"Thomas F. Wilson — Biff Tannen"

"Lea Thompson — Lorraine McFly"

"Crispin Glover — George McFly"

"James Tolkan — Mr. Strickland"

"Donald Fullilove — Goldie Wilson"

"Claudia Wells — Jennifer Parker"

"Harry Waters Jr. — Marvin Berry"

"Marty McFly took a spin in a new sports car last night. But he never got past '55. 1955."

"The story of a young man with a great future behind him."

"Marty's parents were destined to meet in 1955. Until Marty dropped in from the future."

"If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit."

"Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future!"

"I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by."

"Great Scott!"

"Since you're new here, I-I'm gonna cut you a break, today. So, why don't you make like a tree and get outta here?"

"Meet Marty McFly. He's broken the time barrier. Busted his parents' first date. And, maybe, botched his chances of ever being born."

"17-year-old Marty McFly got home early last night. 30 years early."

"Marty McFly just broke the time barrier. He's only got one week to get it fixed."

"Marty McFly's having the time of his life. The only question is—what time is it?"

"He was never in time for his classes... He wasn't in time for his dinner... Then one day... he wasn't in his time at all."

"Bumping into your parents is no big deal unless you bump into them before you were born."

"He's the only kid ever to get into trouble before he was born."

"Hello? Anybody home? Think McFly, Think!"

"Marty McFly has just come between the most unlikely couple in high school... His parents."

"Marty McFly's future is catching up with him."

"I cannot imagine what kind of callous moron could possibly see anything in being a victim of bullying. Maybe the idea comes from our cultural propaganda, where the bullied nerd, like Back to the Futures McFly, always fights back in the triumphant climax, becomes a stronger person for it, and goes on to be a successful patron of a nuclear family, while the bully winds up washing his car. Bullying, in our cultural propaganda, is simply a dramatic plot device which the hero overcomes. Rarely, if ever, is it represented as it really works- as something privately eating away at kids, flat and uninteresting, and never overcome."

"Bob Zemeckis and I had written three movies together, and we had always wanted to do a time-travel story. We'd just never figured out how. What turned the light on for me was coming across my dad's old high-school yearbook and thinking, "Would we have been friends if we'd been at school together?" All of us have that revelation when we understand that our parents were young once, too. That's a big moment. Then there is the message that we all have control over our destinies. I thought we could dramatise those two things."

"I think the first film resonates so well with audiences because of the element of wish-fulfilment at its heart. We've all said to ourselves, "I wish I could go back in time and change something" or, "If only I could do that over again.""

"All the movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds."

"The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing."

"I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead."

"When you're an artist, you pick up on certain things that are in the air. You just feel it. It's not like you're sitting down, thinking, "What can I do to really mess things up?" You're getting ideas, and then the ideas feed into a story, and the story takes shape. And if you're honest about it and you're thinking about characters and what they do, you now see that your ideas are about trouble. You're feeling more depth, and you're describing something that is going on in some way."

"In film, life-and-death struggles make you sit up, lean forward a little bit. They amplify things happening, in smaller ways, in all of us. These things show up in relationships. They show up in struggles and bring them to a critical point."

"The beginning dictates the direction and you never know where you're going to go ... the mood is what you're looking for, and somehow we always find it."

"When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home ... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite."

"Every single thing in the world that was made by anyone started with an idea. So to catch one that is powerful enough to fall in love with, it is one of the most beautiful experiences. It's like being jolted with electricity and knowledge at the same time."

"I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school ... For me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude."

"A film is its own thing and in an ideal world I think a film should be discovered knowing nothing and nothing should be added to it and nothing should be subtracted from it."

"I'm not a political person. ... I don't understand politics, I don't understand the concept of two sides and I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground, but it never seems to come to the middle ground and it's very frustrating watching it and seemingly we're not moving forward. Some change, simple, simple really, relatively speaking, and we're going forwards somewhere, you know? It could be a beautiful place. There's many little obstacles and there's many, many people that are just opposed and we're not going forward."

"My cow is not pretty, but it's pretty to me."

"Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too."

"There's this beautiful ocean of bliss and consciousness that is able to be reached by any human being by diving within, which is really peaceful and harmonious and can be enlivened by the group process. This group is a peace-creating group. It saturates the atmosphere. This is all about establishing peace. Right now, we gotta get peace back in the world. Peace is a real thing."