Top 308 Quotes & Sayings by Steven Spielberg - Page 5

Akira Kurosawa is the pictorial William Shakespeare of our time.

Movies become living organisms that graduate from a filmmaker's sphere of influence and pretty much look back and tell you how they need to be said goodbye to. A movie often turns around and looks at you and says, "Here is who I am, and that's maybe now how you see me, but that's who I've become." And you've got to be open enough to go with that.

You look at war as something that is putting your best friend in jeopardy. You are responsible for the person in front of you and the person behind you, and the person to the left of you and the person to the right of you.

History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.

Unprotected sex just feels better in a Waffle House bathroom.

Godzilla was the most masterful of all dinosaur movies because it made you believe it was really happening.

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

I love Rambo but I think it's potentially a very dangerous movie. It changes history in a frightening way.

There's going to be no more digital enhancements or digital additions to anything based on any film I direct. I'm not going to do any corrections digitally to even wires that show... If 1941 comes on Blu-ray I'm not going to go back and take the wires out because the Blu-ray will bring the wires out that are guiding the airplane down Hollywood Blvd. At this point right now I think letting movies exist in the era, with all the flaws and all of the flourishes, is a wonderful way to mark time and mark history.

I've been told that I'm a very different person on the set than I am in postproduction when the movie's over and I'm editing, in that I get so wound up in the film that I become selfless to the point where I lose too much weight.

I did not make this film about Frank Abagnale because of what he did . . but because of what he has done with his life the past 30 years.

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. Nothing they did was really illegal.

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.

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

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.

There's been more written about Lincoln than movies made about him or television portraying him. He's kind of a stranger to our industry, to this medium. You have to go back to the 1930s to find a movie that's just about Abraham Lincoln. I just found that my fascination with Lincoln, which started as a child, got to the point where after reading so much about him I thought there was a chance to tell a segment of his life to to moviegoers.

The making of the movie and the routine of making the movie is a lot like being in a Spanish prison for five years on a marijuana breakdown.

3D is not a fire and forget tool. It takes a lot of very careful consideration and it will change your approach to where you put the camera so 3D isn't for everybody.

I think every film I make that puts characters in jeopardy is me purging my own fears, sadly only to re-engage with them shortly after the release of the picture. I'll never make enough films to purge them all.

I don't go through a torturous intellectual process to decide what to direct. I know what I want to direct the second I read something or hear a story. I just know when it grabs me in a certain way I want to direct it. And then I spend the next four to six months trying to talk myself out of it, because directing is really hard! But it's true, I know essentially when and what I want to do next... it's an undeniable feeling I get and it's not the same feeling I get when I wind up producing something.

I just think that the qualities of leadership are unknown even to the leader until he's tested and given a challenge.

The creative process is a very collaborative process. I know it might seem that way because so much ink is spilled and the media is obsessed with business and numbers and studios... but filmmakers don't think of it that way. We just go off and we tell our stories. It's the same torture that we adore, it's the same torture that our forefathers endured making movies in the golden era of Hollywood. So, from my perspective it's no different, I'm sure, from the men and women who I admire so much who made the earliest movies.

I think that the perceived downs in my own career come from just managing my time and not feeling that I have enough time for my family or my friends. You could put that in the personal life category but it's all one category because I've got to balance my family.

The older I get, the more I look at movies as a moving miracle.

My dad took me to my first movie.

Wherever you are, I will find you and I will bring you home

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

I've just always had a personal fascination with the myth of Abraham Lincoln. And once you start to read about him and the Civil War and everything leading up to the Civil War, you start to understand that the myth is created when we think we understand a character and we reduce him to a kind of cultural national stereotype.

I get very, very anxious on the set. I have a thousand ideas and I don't censor myself. I wind up cutting some of them out in the editing room... I shoot [needless footage] and then don't use later on in the process.

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.

I'm as guilty as anyone, because I helped to herald the digital era with Jurassic Park. But the danger is that it can be abused to the point where nothing is eye-popping any more.

After a scary movie about the world almost ending, we can walk into the sunlight and say, "Wow, everything's still here. I'm OK!" We like to tease ourselves. Human beings have a need to get close to the edge, and when filmmakers or writers can take them to the edge, it feels like a dream where you're falling, but you wake up just before you hit the ground.

It's funny, you make friends and you lose friends when you're making a movie.

I would lose myself too much if I thought of myself as the audience.

I have to stay interested. I can't do the same thing over and over again, which is why I don't do - I've made sequels, but it's the movies that are not sequels that I enjoy the most.

I dont work weekends. Weekends are for my kids. And I have dinner at home every night when Im not physically directing a movie - I get home by six. I put the kids to bed and tell them stories and take them to school the next morning. I work basically from 9.30 to 5.30 and Im strict about that.

She wanted to go over and hug his tears away, but she was too frightened.

He never gave up. And he does that for us

If the movie does well, or it doesn't do so well, some movies get great reviews, some movies don't... that's just part of what I do for a living. I just move through all that; that doesn't ever stop me.

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

I'd love to build a company that will continue to make movies well beyond me someday. And I'd like to help start something great, even investing in it myself.

Everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner.

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.

There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.

I had to get over my fear of running through the world naked and learn to say 'take me or leave me.'

I've learned there are a lot of people that don't want to believe the Holocaust ever happened because it doesn't fit their other beliefs and so they deny it and it makes them sleep better at night to do so. But it makes the Holocaust survivors sleep better at night to know that we've given them a voice.

I still have pretty much the same fears I had as a kid. I'm not sure I'd want to give them up; a lot of these insecurities fuel the movies I make.

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.

I'm very collaborative with everybody on the set.

I compose the frame literally with the camera. Unless it makes a story point.

Movies principally require the best of everybody, all at the same time, being the best they can be. Not just like five people being the best they've ever been, and 10 people not being the best they could be. It's like if everybody is either doing their greatest work, or the whole house of cards falls apart.

I was fifteen, or sixteen. I was in high school. I was spending a summer in California with my second cousins. And I wanted to be a director really bad. I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.

I've been shooting movies and television shows for now 47 years and I've worked with the best of them and [Kirk Douglas] is the only movie star I ever met.

All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form.

People can relate to horses. Horses, I think, are basically in our genetic history. Horses were part of our culture, part of our collective society, for hundreds of years, and so, the horse is one of the most familiar animals to people of any race or culture or country.

I'm certainly hoping that 3D gets to the point where people do not notice it because once they stop noticing it, it just becomes another tool and an aid to help tell a story.

I've got a lot of examples about moments where I thought something would work on film and it didn't work, but I never came to that decision with the film half shot, where I was stuck on a runaway train and couldn't jump off. On those occasions where I have admitted defeat, that this is not going to work, I haven't embarked on that project and made that movie.

Whatever affect any of my films have on audiences, I just kind of stop at the door. I make them and I just don't go outside after they're over.

There is something that you have that no one else ever had ... When you watch Kirk's [Douglas] performance in anything, in anything he's ever done, you cannot take your eyes off of him. It's not possible to look away from him.

I don't do the running commentary as the movie's playing. I think you should be able to watch the movie without listening to me talk while the movies playing.