There is beauty and humility in imperfection.

Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.

When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was... an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.

I think when we wake up in the morning, we can choose between fear and love. Every morning. And every morning, if you choose one, that doesn't define you until the end... The way you end your story is important. It's important that we choose love over fear, because love is the answer.

I think love is the greatest force in the universe. It's shapeless like water. It only takes the shape of things it becomes.

Making a film is like raising a child. You cannot raise a child to be liked by everyone. You raise a child to excel, and you teach the child to be true to his own nature. There will be people who'll dislike your child because he or she is who they are, and there will be people who'll love your child immensely for the very same reason.

There is art and beauty and power in the primal images of fantasy.

For me, real life is hard work. Making movies is like a vacation for my soul.

I wrote a screenplay for 'The Witches,' which Alfonso Cuaron was producing, but we couldn't get it made! The studio just wouldn't greenlight that movie. It's my favorite Roald Dahl book, 'The Witches,' because I grew up with my grandmother a lot of the time, and the relationship between the boy and the grandmother speaks volumes to me.

I love monsters the way people worship holy images. To me, they really connect in a very fundamental way to my identity.

I'm not that interested in recreating reality. I'm interested in recreating an emotional truth.

I had nightmares as a kid. As an adult, I have very prosaic dreams.

Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching 'Pan's Labyrinth:' An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It's not easy.

More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.

In Mexico, you're close to death all the time.

I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget.

I think Roald Dahl had the rarest combination of talking to kids about complex emotions, and he was able to show you that the world of kids was sophisticated, complex, and had a lot more darkness than adults ever want to remember.

I've been going through immigration all my life, and I've been stopped for traffic violations by cops, and they get much more curious about me than the regular guy. The moment they hear my accent, things get a little deeper.

There is a heavy Mexican Catholic streak in my movies, and a huge Mexican sense of melodrama. Everything is overwrought, and there's a sense of acceptance of the fantastic in my films, which is innately Mexican. So when people ask, 'How can you define the Mexican-ness of your films?' I go, 'How can I not?' It's all I am.

It is unnatural to deny effort, adversity, and pain.

I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen.

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.

The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else - whether they're gay, Mexican, Jewish, black - and saying, 'They are different than you. They're the reason you're in the shape you're in. You're not responsible.' And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.

The way I love monsters is a Mexican way of loving monsters, which is that I am not judgmental. The Anglo way of seeing things is that monsters are exceptional and bad, and people are good. But in my movies, creatures are taken for granted.

The creature from the black lagoon - I drew that creature almost every day, two, three times a day, for probably my first ten years of life, you know.

I'd love to come back as the most annoying ghost ever.

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.

Everything I do, I do it with the hope that people will watch it more than twice. Whether it's 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Pacific Rim' or the opening of 'The Simpsons,' I do it with that hope.

When I did 'Mimic,' it was such a difficult experience to try to make. Believe it or not, I did try to make a really adult giant bug movie. And then, in the course of the process, it kind of died a horrible death and gave birth to the movie that exists now, which now, in retrospect, I like. But it's not the movie I set out to do.

I started seeing in the monsters as a more sincere form of religion because the priests were not that great, but Frankenstein was great.

For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.

I think the greatest giant insect movie ever made is 'Them!'

To me, movies are books. They are texts to be consulted.

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.

I like monsters, and when the monster is a superhero, it's a byproduct. Like Hellboy, the Hulk, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Constantine, Demon, Dr. Strange, Spectre, Deadman. Those are the superheroes I followed as a kid religiously.

I believe that we will elevate and differentiate the discourse of cinema the more we discuss image creation in specific terms.

Any actor I admire and enjoy working with - Sergi Lopez as the bad guy in 'Pan's Labyrinth,' or the little girl who played young Mako in 'Pacific Rim,' it makes no difference - I like actors with a very strong centre.

Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' was influenced by Lovecraft big time. He wanted to make his monsters Lovecraftian. But I think many other films have been influenced by Lovecraft - like 'Alien,' which is almost an outer-space version of 'At The Mountains Of Madness.'

I was a kid when I read Jane Eyre and fell in love with that universe. I didn't have the acumen to say the prose is old or the prose is too complex. I just fell in love with Jane's very lonely soul, much the same way I fell in love with Frankenstein's creature for the same reason. Those old souls exist in every decade in every century.

You cannot convince a Buddhist to become a Protestant any more than you can convince a person who embraces realism as the highest form of art that fantasy is an equally important manifestation. It's impossible.

I have 7,000 DVDs and Blu-rays. I have thousands of books - thousands - and roughly 15,000 comic books or something like that, hundreds of books about different art movements - the symbolists, the dadaists, the Pre-Raphaelites, the impressionists - you know, that I consult before I start every movie.

If you want to know how to handle a crew, it's great to be part of a crew.

I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.

I saw a martyr in the Wolf Man, who is the very moving essence of outsiderness, with which I identified fully.

I'm fortunate enough that my personal life falls into whack with my professional life. My kids love visiting the sets; they love the monsters.

I'm having a lot of fun on Twitter, tweeting about books.

I'm a book guy first, and my education came from two encyclopedias. One was an encyclopedia of health, so I became morbidly obsessed with anatomy, and I thought I had trichinosis, an aneurism, jaundice! And then an encyclopedia of art.

To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.

Most of the time - in 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Devil's Backbone' - I'm talking about my childhood.