Top 70 Steven Spielberg Quotes

Everybody who works for Amblin Television has to do five jobs.

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

I was a scared kid… I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else’s lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism.

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.

Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.

If the world ran the way a crew runs a set, we’d have a better, more progressive world.

Tracking action without cutting is the least jarring method of placing the audience into a real-time experience where they are the ones making the subtle choices of where and when to look.

I made ‘Saving Private Ryan’ for my father. He’s the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.

I’m not really interested in making money.

Cell phones tend to bring us more inside of our lives whereas movies offer a chance to escape, so there are two competing forces.

I feel I’m all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.

I have a choice – I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can’t do both.

I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

‘E.T.’ began with me trying to write a story about my parents’ divorce.

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

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.

The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.

I don’t think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it’s certainly worth a try.

And I may often question choices I make as a producer. But I’ve never questioned the choices I make as a director.

There were so many odd, strange things about Abraham Lincoln that I think nobody knew how to pigeonhole him.

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

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.

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

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.

Lincoln believed in the American people.

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.

My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.

I’ve always been interested in UFOs.

All of us every single year, we’re a different person. I don’t think we’re the same person all our lives.

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.

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.

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.

When I don’t have a story to tell, I’m a terror to live with.

It’s still a mystery to me, but even though my mother was like an older sister to me, I kind of put her up on a pedestal.

A lot of kids only know ‘E.T.’ from the digitally-enhanced version.

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

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

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

There are so many rumours about so many of us in the public eye. Sometimes it’s too hard to deny what is not true.

I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The machinery of the democratic process is really no different today from what it was 150 years ago.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I don’t make unconventional stories; I don’t make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

I quit college so fast I didn’t even clean out my locker.

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.

Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.

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.

I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn’t often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.

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