Steven Spielberg quotes:

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  • The only time I have a good hunch the audience is going to be there is when I make the sequel to 'Jurassic Park' or I make another Indiana Jones movie. I know I've got a good shot at getting an audience on opening night. Everything else that is striking out into new territory is a crap shoot.

  • Before statehood was achieved, Syria and Egypt had their tanks and military equipment lined up to invade Tel Aviv and destroy it; but the Israelis scrambled together an air force, some of it from old Second World War Messerschmidts, and the invasion was halted.

  • Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we're too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.

  • I have never before, in my long and eclectic career, been gifted with such an abundance of natural beauty as I experienced filming 'War Horse' on Dartmoor.

  • The baby boomers owe a big debt of gratitude to the parents and grandparents - who we haven't given enough credit to anyway - for giving us another generation.

  • The bones of the story of 'War Horse' is a love story. That's what makes it universal.

  • When I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it's you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.

  • My dad took me out to see a meteor shower when I was a little kid, and it was scary for me because he woke me up in the middle of the night. My heart was beating; I didn't know what he wanted to do. He wouldn't tell me, and he put me in the car and we went off, and I saw all these people lying on blankets, looking up at the sky.

  • I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.

  • I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it's really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it.

  • History opens up new worlds to film-makers all the time.

  • From the day I started to think politically and to develop my own moral values, from my earliest youth, I have been an ardent defender of Israel.

  • I turned down 'Harry Potter' and 'Spider-Man,' two movies that I knew would be phenomenally successful, because I had already made movies like that before and they offered no challenge to me. I don't need my ego to be reminded.

  • All presidents swear an oath to the Constitution to keep this country united, and when the country fell apart, Lincoln had to put it back together again, with a lot of help. But he bore total responsibility.

  • I missed my dad a lot growing up, even though we were together as a family. My dad was really a workaholic. And he was always working.

  • My dad took me to my first movie. It was 'The Greatest Show on Earth' in 1952, a movie of such scale it was actually a traumatic experience.

  • Even if I'd had a really happy relationship with my father and there was no emotional hiatus for a decade and a half, I probably would still have made some of the same choices for movies that I've made.

  • I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That's never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad's 8-millimeter movie camera.

  • The Color Purple' is the kind of character piece that a director like Sidney Lumet could do brilliantly with one hand tied behind his back.

  • I thought film was more important than life itself for many years. But I was naive to the world until my first child was born in 1985.

  • When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.

  • People often tell me how much they love the digital skies that we obviously painted for 'War Horse.' Well, there's not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced - but it was definitely challenging at times.

  • Lincoln's leadership is based on a number of precepts, but my favorite one is that he acted in the name, and for the good, of the people.

  • I believe in 3D for certain kinds of films. I certainly believe in using 3D for all things in animation because animation has such clarity and so much depth of focus. It worked great with 'Avatar' because 70 percent of that film is animated.

  • Because of how much movies cost, it's dangerous to be experimental on one film after the other. But we can experiment with television. We can do things that are fringe and bring ideas to the table that are offbeat and original.

  • My head's not in the clouds, but I think I've gotten too much credit for being an astute businessman.

  • My father had many, many veterans over to the house, and the older I got the more I appreciated their sacrifice.

  • When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

  • I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters.

  • I've always sort of time-locked and mind-blocked myself in my 30s, and that's always the age I feel.

  • The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.

  • This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we're not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally.

  • There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen.

  • Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.

  • People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

  • There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.

  • I think every movie I've made after 'Indiana Jones,' I've tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I'm very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject.

  • I think one of the worst things that happened to me was, you know, my voluntary fallout with my father. And then the greatest thing that happened to me was when I saw the light, and realized I needed to love him in a way that he could love me back.

  • I even get inspired by movies that aren't very good, because there's always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There's good in everything, I find.

  • You have many years ahead of you to create the dreams that we can't even imagine dreaming. You have done more for the collective unconscious of this planet than you will ever know.

  • I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.

  • Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director's point of view.

  • For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

  • I am an American Jew and aware of the sensitivities involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  • The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jihadism have nothing to do with each other.

  • The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II.

  • I love history, so I do a lot of movies about history.

  • I don't really have a schedule of when I want to show my children my movies.

  • I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.

  • I had a great time creating the future on 'Minority Report,' and it's a future that is coming true faster than any of us thought it would.

  • My first reaction every time I delve into an episode of history that I don't know very much about is... my first reaction is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.

  • I dream for a living.

  • I'm not really interested in making money.

  • I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild.

  • Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about.

  • For one thing, I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.

  • I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.

  • I am a very impatient director.

  • I've always wanted to tell a story about Lincoln. I saw a paternal father figure; I saw someone who was completely, stubbornly committed to his ideals, to his vision.

  • Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that's what I think keeps me hungry.

  • The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.

  • I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there's film going through the camera.

  • I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.

  • E.T.' began with me trying to write a story about my parents' divorce.

  • I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

  • When I was younger, all I cared about was what people thought of me and my films. Now I care less about catering, hand-serving, hand-feeding the audience. I've gotten to the point now in my life where I'm serving myself.

  • When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.

  • Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to come. It's easier for an audience to take warnings from sci-fi without feeling that we're preaching to them. Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that's worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.

  • The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.

  • I dream for a living. Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make.

  • Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to and I see another movie I want to make.

  • I made 'Empire of the Sun' in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.

  • One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.

  • I don't drink coffee. I've never had a cup of coffee in my entire life. That's something you probably don't know about me. I've hated the taste since I was a kid.

  • I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.

  • I guess my first digital movie was 'Tintin' because 'Tintin' has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It's 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I'm still planning to shoot everything on film.

  • Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as 'The Pacific'.

  • If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.

  • You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!

  • The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.

  • You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

  • A lot of the films I've made probably could have worked just as well 50 years ago, and that's just because I have a lot of old-fashion values.

  • It is not my job to compare my movies. I don't like to compare my films with other movies because I don't really have that perspective. It is an intellectual exercise, but it doesn't intuitively come to me.

  • The only movie that I would ever even consider retrofitting is the first 'Jurassic Park,' which I think would look pretty spectacular in 3D. That's the only one of my films that I would consider doing in 3D.

  • You can't intellectually purge yourself of who you are. Whatever that is, it's going to come out in the wash, the film wash. What you are is going to be relevant, if not to yourself, to the movies you make.

  • I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven't ever directed a film where I haven't made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.

  • I simply adore 'The Simpsons.' I go to bed in a 'Simpsons' T-shirt.

  • The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time.

  • So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.

  • As a Jew I am aware of how important the existence of Israel is for the survival of us all. And because I am proud of being Jewish, I am worried by the growing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the world.

  • Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else.

  • One of my daughters is a competitive jumper, we live with horses, we have stables on our property. But I don't ride. I observe, and I worry.

  • If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot not support the policies of his government.

  • I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.

  • When I felt like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.

  • I think in terms of chapters. Every time I finish a movie, it's a chapter. When one of my kids graduates from school, that's a chapter.

  • Daddy, are you going to yell at us some more today?'Neary gazed down into her clear, guileless eyes. That was how he looked to her---a yelling machine. And she was prepared to accept more yelling because she loved him.

  • I did 50 takes on Robert Shaw assembling the Greener Gun on 'Jaws.' The shark wasn't working, so I just kept shooting to make the production report look like we were accomplishing something and to keep cast and crew from going crazy from boredom. It was a strategic indulgence.

  • Once scouting fully opens its doors to all who desire the same experience that so fully enriched me as a young person, I will be happy to reconsider a role on the advisory board.

  • I think all directors should be animators...

  • Before I go off and direct a movie, I always look at four films. They tend to be The Seven Samurai, Lawrence Of Arabia, It's A Wonderful Life and The Searchers.

  • Audrey gave more than she ever got. The whole world is going to miss her.

  • I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.

  • I have always admired him (Bergman), and I wish I could be an equally good filmmaker as he is, but it will never happen. His love for the cinema almost gives me a guilty conscience

  • Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?

  • I feel like Ive been engaged to the British Empire since 1980 and tonight you have given me the ring knighthood.

  • It [Lincoln movie] had nothing to do with politics. It had nothing to do with holding a mirror up to the way we conduct our business on Capitol Hill. This was meant to be a story, a Lincoln portrait if you will. I think any time is the right time for a very compelling story, any time.

  • Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life.

  • The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years.

  • I've kept the people who've been in my career who I feel are my family. Kathy [Kennedy] had been with me since 1978. Janusz Kaminsky, my cinematographer, has made every movie with me since Schindler's List. Michael Kahn has cut every movie I've directed since 1976 when we made Close Encounters together. Rick Carter has done more than 15 of my directed films as a production designer.

  • We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.

  • I love to go to a regular movie theater, especially when the movie is a big crowd-pleaser. It's much better watching a movie with 500 people making noise than with just a dozen.

  • Desperate times require desperate measures. What Lincoln and the Lobbyist for the Amendment and the Manager of the Amendment and himself, what they did to get this passed was not illegal. It was murky, but what they did was noble and grand. How they went about it was somewhat murky, but nothing they did was really illegal.

  • When I grow up, I still want to be a director.

  • The world would be a poorer place without Doctor Who.

  • I basically went into business for myself. But it never amounted to anything. I learned a lot about editing and dubbing by watching all the professionals do it, but I never got a job out of my imposition.

  • Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive.

  • I'm very used to working with first time actors - you can just look back at 'E.T.' with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from 'Empire of the Sun,' who'd never made a movie before.

  • Fathering is a major job, but I need both things in my life: my job to be a director, and my kids to direct me.

  • There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.

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