Steven Spielberg Quotes

I think in terms of chapters. Every time I finish a movie, it's a chapter. When one of my kids graduates from school, that's a chapter.

- Steven Spielberg

I think every movie I've made after 'Indiana Jones,' I've tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I'm very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject.

- Steven Spielberg

When I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it's you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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

I didn't read reviews earlier in my career, but I read them now as I'm older. I read them all.

- Steven Spielberg

Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.

- Steven Spielberg

My dad took me out to see a meteor shower when I was a little kid, and it was scary for me because he woke me up in the middle of the night. My heart was beating; I didn't know what he wanted to do. He wouldn't tell me, and he put me in the car and we went off, and I saw all these people lying on blankets, looking up at the sky.

- Steven Spielberg

In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible.

- Steven Spielberg

I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven't ever directed a film where I haven't made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.

- Steven Spielberg

I believe in 3D for certain kinds of films. I certainly believe in using 3D for all things in animation because animation has such clarity and so much depth of focus. It worked great with 'Avatar' because 70 percent of that film is animated.

- Steven Spielberg

My dad took me to my first movie. It was 'The Greatest Show on Earth' in 1952, a movie of such scale it was actually a traumatic experience.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

Lincoln's leadership is based on a number of precepts, but my favorite one is that he acted in the name, and for the good, of the people.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

You can't intellectually purge yourself of who you are. Whatever that is, it's going to come out in the wash, the film wash. What you are is going to be relevant, if not to yourself, to the movies you make.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I simply adore 'The Simpsons.' I go to bed in a 'Simpsons' T-shirt.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director's point of view.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to come. It's easier for an audience to take warnings from sci-fi without feeling that we're preaching to them. Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that's worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.

- Steven Spielberg

There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?

- Steven Spielberg

I dream for a living.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

- Steven Spielberg

I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I'm very used to working with first time actors - you can just look back at 'E.T.' with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from 'Empire of the Sun,' who'd never made a movie before.

- Steven Spielberg

Money to me is not a factor in my life.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.

- Steven Spielberg

I turned down 'Harry Potter' and 'Spider-Man,' two movies that I knew would be phenomenally successful, because I had already made movies like that before and they offered no challenge to me. I don't need my ego to be reminded.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.

- Steven Spielberg

My first reaction every time I delve into an episode of history that I don't know very much about is... my first reaction is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.

- Steven Spielberg

I'm not in a race with anybody to make the biggest hit movie anymore. I am just trying to tell stories that I can stay interested in for the two years it takes me to supervise the writing and to direct them.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years.

- Steven Spielberg

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

I guess my first digital movie was 'Tintin' because 'Tintin' has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It's 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I'm still planning to shoot everything on film.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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

I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.

- Steven Spielberg

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

When I don't have a movie, I don't take a job just for the sake of working. I just sit it out until I find something I'm passionate about.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

I made 'Empire of the Sun' in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.

- Steven Spielberg

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

I've always wanted to tell a story about Lincoln. I saw a paternal father figure; I saw someone who was completely, stubbornly committed to his ideals, to his vision.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there's film going through the camera.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

All presidents swear an oath to the Constitution to keep this country united, and when the country fell apart, Lincoln had to put it back together again, with a lot of help. But he bore total responsibility.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I am an American Jew and aware of the sensitivities involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

- Steven Spielberg

Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood - these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies out of Hollywood. It's disastrous.

- Steven Spielberg

People often tell me how much they love the digital skies that we obviously painted for 'War Horse.' Well, there's not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced - but it was definitely challenging at times.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

Lincoln believed in the American people.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

The baby boomers owe a big debt of gratitude to the parents and grandparents - who we haven't given enough credit to anyway - for giving us another generation.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.

- Steven Spielberg

The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating. It's bound to try a man's soul.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

'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

I missed my dad a lot growing up, even though we were together as a family. My dad was really a workaholic. And he was always working.

- Steven Spielberg

I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

I don't drink coffee. I've never had a cup of coffee in my entire life. That's something you probably don't know about me. I've hated the taste since I was a kid.

- Steven Spielberg

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

Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that's what I think keeps me hungry.

- Steven Spielberg

I'm not a great man to my children. I'm just 'Pop.' The more involved I am with my kids, it keeps my head flat on top.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I love my kids as individuals, not as a herd, and I do have a herd of children: I have seven kids.

- Steven Spielberg

I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.

- Steven Spielberg

We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.

- Steven Spielberg

My father had many, many veterans over to the house, and the older I got the more I appreciated their sacrifice.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.

- Steven Spielberg

The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

- Steven Spielberg

When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.

- Steven Spielberg

I'm not really interested in making money.

- Steven Spielberg

You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.

- Steven Spielberg

It all starts with the script: it's not worth taking myself away from my family if I don't have something I'm really passionate about.

- Steven Spielberg

I don't play online games. 'Warcraft,' I've played that, but I mainly play action games.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

- Steven Spielberg

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

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

I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday.

- Steven Spielberg

From the day I started to think politically and to develop my own moral values, from my earliest youth, I have been an ardent defender of Israel.

- Steven Spielberg

I've always been interested in how we survive and how resourceful we are as Americans.

- Steven Spielberg

There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.

- Steven Spielberg

When I grow up, I still want to be a director.

- Steven Spielberg

I would love to do a musical. I would love that. I would have to find the right book, the right story, but some day I'm going to make one. I would really like to go off and direct a musical. That's what I would really like to do when I grow up.

- Steven Spielberg

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

- Steven Spielberg

I am a very impatient director.

- Steven Spielberg

My dad's been responsible for a lot of my issues.

- Steven Spielberg

I've always sort of time-locked and mind-blocked myself in my 30s, and that's always the age I feel.

- Steven Spielberg

My problem is that my imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC oil; I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's just always been there. I got it from my mom.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.

- Steven Spielberg

I feel there is no substitute for going out to the movies. There is nothing like it.

- Steven Spielberg

Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to and I see another movie I want to make.

- Steven Spielberg

You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!

- Steven Spielberg

You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

- Steven Spielberg

Most of my presumptions about a production are usually wrong.

- Steven Spielberg

Whether in success or in failure, I'm proud of every single movie I've ever directed.

- Steven Spielberg

Television has a different biorhythm than movies. I love the biorhythm of TV.

- Steven Spielberg

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.

- Steven Spielberg

I've always been interested in UFOs.

- Steven Spielberg