Top 25 James Cameron Quotes

Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don’t use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.

I mean, you have to be able – you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can’t do it by yourself.

What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?

There is a hugely underserved population out there… those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.

The films that influenced me were so disparate that there’s almost no pattern.

I’ve tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don’t like it when people are deferential to me because I’m an established filmmaker. It’s a blue-collar sensibility.

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.

The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they’ll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.

I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. It’s very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy – a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they’re required to keep an agreement with you only if you’re successful or they need you.

Inspiration can hit you in the head at any time in any context. It could happen in a conversation. Talking to someone at a party, you can get an idea. But you’ve got to remember those inspirations.

I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.

I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.

I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.

It’ll be all of our efforts together. It won’t won’t ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it’s going to be the sum total of the group.

You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything.

I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.

I certainly didn’t think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football.

The film industry is about saying ‘no’ to people, and inherently you cannot take ‘no’ for an answer.

I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt. It saves so much time.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.

Nature’s imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We’ll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

I’m a storyteller; that’s what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven’t been and returning to tell a story they haven’t heard before.