Happiness Quote by Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino’s genius move here is the fake shrug. He’s bragging and disowning the brag at the same time, the kind of confident self-mythmaking that lets him keep the outlaw aura even while he’s collecting Oscars. “I’m very happy with the way I write” is clean, almost blunt pride; “I think I do it good” immediately undercuts that polish with a deliberately un-literary phrasing, like he’s swatting away the idea that writing belongs to a refined priesthood. It’s a posture: I can out-write you, but I’m not joining your club.

The line “I’ve never really considered myself a writer” isn’t modesty so much as brand maintenance. Tarantino’s cultural identity is built around being a director-as-DJ, sampling genres, cadence, and cinematic memory. By refusing the “writer” label, he frames his scripts as raw material for performance, editing, camera movement, and music cues rather than as texts meant for reverent reading. It’s also a preemptive defense against the most common critique of him: that the dialogue is too writerly, too pleased with itself. He answers by saying, essentially, I’m not trying to be Hemingway; I’m trying to make it play.

Context matters: Tarantino came up through video stores and grindhouse fandom, not MFA workshops. The subtext is class and gatekeeping. He’s claiming authority without credentials, positioning craft as something you can master by obsession and taste. The irony is that he’s one of the era’s most distinctive screenwriters; the denial is part of what keeps the work feeling dangerous, not institutional.