Top 100 Steven Spielberg Quotes
#1. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#2. I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
Steven Spielberg
#3. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#5. Because television doesn't offer the kind of budget that a movie offers, you've got to be a little more careful where you spend the money to put the fiction in science.
Steven Spielberg
#6. Some movies I make for myself. I just sort of make them for myself. I do that sometimes when the subject matter is very sensitive and very personal and I really can't imagine I'm an audience.
Steven Spielberg
#7. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#8. The best time of my life has been the three instances where I have been there for the birth of my children. That is, nothing [else] has ever come close.
Steven Spielberg
#9. The essence of what it is to be American is the deep moral urge to be free, to freely express yourself and have the right to do so, and to look at all people as equals.
Steven Spielberg
#10. I feel I'm all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.
Steven Spielberg
#11. I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.
Steven Spielberg
#12. The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.
Steven Spielberg
#13. Movies are always in a state of locomotion. You start with a general idea of how it should feel and then you find you've got a runaway train. You have to race to catch up: the movie is telling you what it wants to become, and when that happens there's no greater feeling.
Steven Spielberg
#14. Making a movie where the central character is a horse was a challenge. Because I'm scared of riding. I was thrown as a kid. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#15. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#16. The thing that I'm just scared to death of is that someday I'm going to wake up and bore somebody with a film.
Steven Spielberg
#17. Cell phones tend to bring us more inside of our lives whereas movies offer a chance to escape, so there are two competing forces.
Steven Spielberg
#18. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#19. For one thing, I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.
Steven Spielberg
#20. If movies generically don't work, you immediately start to pick apart what ingredients contributed to that. If any movie is working, hopefully how it was made will be the least of your concern. You'll only want to have a god time.
Steven Spielberg
#21. I wanted to do another movie that could make us laugh and cry and feel good about the world. I wanted to do something else that could make us smile. This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.
Steven Spielberg
#22. The only time I'm totally happy is when I'm watching films or making them.
Steven Spielberg
#23. I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.
Steven Spielberg
#24. All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.
Steven Spielberg
#25. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#26. In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era.
Steven Spielberg
#27. Unprotected sex just feels better in a Waffle House bathroom.
Steven Spielberg
#28. I don't dream at night, I dream at day, I dream all day; I'm dreaming for living.
Steven Spielberg
#29. Wherever you are, I will find you and I will bring you home
Steven Spielberg
#30. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#31. Audience members are only concerned about the story, the concept, the bells and whistles and the noise that a popular film starts to make even before it's popular. So audiences will not be drawn to the technology; they'll be drawn to the story. And I hope it always remains that way.
Steven Spielberg
#32. I committed to directing 'Catch Me If You Can' not because of the divorce component, but principally because Frank Abagnale did things that were the most astonishing scams I had ever heard.
Steven Spielberg
#34. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#35. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#36. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#38. I compose the frame literally with the camera. Unless it makes a story point.
Steven Spielberg
#39. The turning point in my career was Jaws. It was a turning point because I was a director-for-hire before Jaws and because it was such a big hit I could do any movie I wanted and Hollywood just wrote me a cheque.
Steven Spielberg
#40. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#41. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#42. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#43. The machinery of the democratic process is really no different today from what it was 150 years ago.
Steven Spielberg
#45. I just think that the qualities of leadership are unknown even to the leader until he's tested and given a challenge.
Steven Spielberg
#46. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#47. Most of my presumptions about a production are usually wrong.
Steven Spielberg
#49. I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there's film going through the camera.
Steven Spielberg
#50. I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.
Steven Spielberg
#51. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#52. I feel like Ive been engaged to the British Empire since 1980 and tonight you have given me the ring knighthood.
Steven Spielberg
#53. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#54. In the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like Kubrick's vision. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery, of humour and contradictions. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy.
Steven Spielberg
#55. The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.
Steven Spielberg
#56. I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.
Steven Spielberg
#57. I always think if it's a good story, the audience can't wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting.
Steven Spielberg
#58. The work that I'm proudest of is the work that I'm most afraid of.
Steven Spielberg
#59. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#60. All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that's why it takes so long.
Steven Spielberg
#62. An animal has no intellectual capacity to justify or to find reasons to exist. An animal just exists because it's the natural thing to do.
Steven Spielberg
#63. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#64. '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.
Steven Spielberg
#65. The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years.
Steven Spielberg
#66. The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.
Steven Spielberg
#67. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#68. I think the secret of great acting is that you have to bring your imagination to the party. You have to have a great imagination and you have to bring it every day when you're working. Your imagination and your skills as an actor are what see you through, not what you're wearing or where you are.
Steven Spielberg
#69. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#70. My head's not in the clouds, but I think I've gotten too much credit for being an astute businessman.
Steven Spielberg
#71. She wanted to go over and hug his tears away, but she was too frightened.
Steven Spielberg
#72. I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday.
Steven Spielberg
#74. Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.
Steven Spielberg
#75. I feel there is no substitute for going out to the movies. There is nothing like it.
Steven Spielberg
#76. I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
Steven Spielberg
#77. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#78. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#80. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#81. The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.
Steven Spielberg
#82. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#83. I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.
Steven Spielberg
#84. My early exposure to all the leviathans of the Saturday matinee creature features inspired me, when I grew up, to make 'Jurassic Park.'
Steven Spielberg
#85. When I felt like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.
Steven Spielberg
#86. There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.
Steven Spielberg
#87. Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else.
Steven Spielberg
#88. I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild.
Steven Spielberg
#90. Television has a different biorhythm than movies. I love the biorhythm of TV.
Steven Spielberg
#91. 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.
Steven Spielberg
#92. I'll probably never win an Oscar, but I'll sure have a lot of fun! I really believe that movies are the great escape.
Steven Spielberg
#94. There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen.
Steven Spielberg
#95. I always like to play with my kids. I always have the time to do that. That's my priority, always has been, so just interacting with my kids, and being with them is great.
Steven Spielberg
#96. I love my kids as individuals, not as a herd, and I do have a herd of children: I have seven kids.
Steven Spielberg
#97. If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.
Steven Spielberg
#98. It [science fiction] really is the only genre that lets you use your imagination without limitations.
Steven Spielberg
#99. Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.
Steven Spielberg
#100. 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.
Steven Spielberg
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