Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by J. J. Abrams
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American director J. J. Abrams.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
My work isn't any more important than anything else in the family.
I have no style. There are certain people who just have a visual sense that defines their work. You could probably watch 30 seconds of anything they do and you'll know exactly who directed it. I don't have that skill.
When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal.
I hope to make movies that are so small they don't need to make anything to be profitable.
The Internet now provides an immediate and very clear consensus of what it is that the audience is experiencing. It's something that you should never let lead you, and yet at the same time, you should never ignore it.
I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.
Ratings have changed, viewer habits have changed and the options for the audience have grown enormously, but I don't think how you tell a story is fundamentally different.
I believe in anything that will engage the audience and make the story more effective.
I think when you're 10 years old, it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things.
With three kids you are just trying to survive. You can't be fastidious.
What I'm still grappling with and learning how to do is to be looking and thinking cinematically, having come from television.
We live in an age of instant knowledge. And there's almost a sense of entitlement to that.
Whenever I've directed something, there's this feeling of demand and focus that I like.
I've had the same friends since I was in kindergarten.
When you go to commercial, you want something to call the viewers back, and if you don't have a decent act out, the audience probably won't be there in the numbers you want when the show returns.
I mean, my dad's a television producer, and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do.
I think that even if you're wondering if two characters are ever going to kiss, drawing out the inevitability is part of the fun. Whatever the genre happens to be.
I love the idea of anthropomorphizing machines. I love the idea of taking technology and giving it a personality.
You know, we've got to this place, where you go to a movie for one particular surgical fix. So, it's like, I want the pulse-pounding action, or the insane falling-off-my-seat comedy, or the devastating, heart-breaking drama.
'Star Trek' was always a little bit closed emotionally. I never connected to the characters.
When I was a kid, among the other embarrassing things I would do, and there's a list of stupid things, but I would make these dumb comedy tapes. I would often make prank phone calls, but I would also do it with friends.
When there's an authentic mystery, as opposed to just a question being asked, that's what makes you lean forward.
There's nothing wrong with doing sequels, they're just easier to sell.
To me the interesting main character is never the one without flaws.
I'm not trying to be coy or manipulative or Machiavellian, I want to spark people's imaginations.
Robotics are beginning to cross that line from absolutely primitive motion to motion that resembles animal or human behavior.
One of my favorite things about 'Star Trek' wasn't just the overt banter but the humor in that show about the relationships between the main characters and their reactions to the situations they would face; there was a lot of comedy in that show without ever breaking its reality.
I'm a fast writer.
The ability of a television series to make adjustments is something you've got to take advantage of.
I'd love to do a movie where the monster is human, where the issue is not otherworldly, or horror or science fiction.
I don't try and write strong female characters or strong male characters, I just try and write, hopefully, strong characters and sometimes they happen to be female.
When I was a kid, it was a huge insult to be a geek. Now it's a point of pride in a weird way.
The goal is always to do B material in an A fashion.
I'm literally open to any medium that will have me.
I love working with the right actor, and if the right actor happens to be unknown, that should be allowed, too, I think.
When I was a little kid - and even still - I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made - at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do magic.
You never want to have that ticking clock and know that you had all this time and didn't use it.
I work with really hard-working people who are really good at what they do.
I try to work on shows that I would want to watch.
I was never really a comic-book fanatic.
I am lucky, I'm the first to admit that.
Pitching is always a weird, difficult thing.
My mother is the coolest, most amazing person I know.
Making movies was more a reaction to not being chosen for sports. Other kids were out there playing at whatever; I was off making something blow up and filming it, or making a mould of my sister's head using alginating plaster.
It's a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling.
Whenever a toddler sees a pile of blocks, he wants to tear it down.
I have nothing against 3-D in theory. But I've also never run to the movies because something's in 3-D.
I love recording music.
Obviously with the Internet and increased access to other means of watching shows, the audience has dispersed and is all over the place and that is a challenge.
I'm obsessed with things that are distinctly analogue.
I've never done Twitter.
All the times I've been lucky enough to be a part of a show that's actually gotten on the air, it's always that same mixture of excitement and utter fear.
People never know what they want, though everyone says they do. If they did, nobody would ever be surprised.
I love movies with spectacle but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn't have to be a creature.
Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.
What's a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You go to the theater, you're just so excited to see anything - the moment the lights go down is often the best part.
You can never guess or assume what anyone is going to think.
When I was a kid going into the movies, you weren't force-fed information everywhere you looked about what the movie was going to be.
As a kid, 'Star Wars' was much more my thing than 'Star Trek' was.
We're living at a time where if you do a Google search for a 'show, review and network,' you'll get 'The New York Times' and Pete Billingsley from a town you've never heard of on the same results page. It's kind of democratizing the process so that everyone has access to a distribution system to express themselves.
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