George Lucas Quotes

We are all living in cages with the door wide open.

I am more of a visual person than a verbal person. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.

I live a reasonably simple life, off the beaten track.

You can't put a title card at the head of the movie and say, "Well, we really had a bad problem. You know, the actor got sick and it rained this day and we had a hurricane."

I'm the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they're going to throw rocks at me, they're going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.

The ideals and principles for which Martin Luther King Jr. fought have never been forgotten and are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.

When you get a small group of fans who hate something, it becomes compounded by the internet. The press picks up the internet like it's a source. They don't realise it is just one person typing out their opinion.

You must let go of your past and embrace your future and figure out what path you're going to go down

I think that God gave us a brain, and that it's the only thing we have to survive. All life forms have some advantage, some trick, some claw, some camouflage, some poison, some speed, something to help them survive. We've got a brain. Therefore it's our duty to use our brain.

You have to have a thick enough skin to cope with the criticism. I'm very self-critical and I have a lot of friends that I trust who are film directors and writers and people in my profession.

It was the money from 'Star Wars' and 'Jaws' that allowed the theaters to build their multiplexes, which allowed an opening up of screens.

It wasn't long after I began writing Star Wars that I realized the story was more than a single film could hold. As the saga of the Skywalkers and Jedi Knights unfolded, I began to see it as a tale that could take at least nine films to tell - three trilogies - and I realized, in making my way through the back story and after story, that I was really setting out to make the middle story.

I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.

One of the basic motifs in fairy tales is that you find the poor and unfortunate along the side of the road, and when they beg for help, if you give it to them, you end up succeeding. If you don't give it to them, you end up being turned into a frog or something. It's something that's been around for thousands of years, a concept that's been around for thousands of years.

A lot of great thinkers- like Einstein and Newton- come up with their best ideas when they're young because they don't yet think in the way that the establishment teaches them. Sometimes your lack of knowledge frees your mind to be creative and think in a different way. But you still have to be logical and figure out a practical way to get things done, even though you're looking at things differently.

There wasn't anything in my life that was going to stop me from making movies.

If you want to be successful in a particular field of endeavor, I think perseverance is one of the key qualities.

If I make a movie that has a whole bunch of music in it, I get to listen to the music all day long, and I don't have to say, 'Well, I gotta go back to work and I gotta stop listening to the music.' I get to listen to music and go to work.

He took me from not being able to write a word in terms of writing screenplays to being the king of wooden dialogue.

[Star Wars is] designed primarily to make young people think about the mystery. Not to say, 'Here's the answer.' It's to say, 'Think about this for a second. Is there a God? What does God look like? What does God sound like? What does God feel like? How do we relate to God?'

I wanted Yoda to be the traditional kind of character you find in fairy tales and mythology. And that character is usually a frog or a wizened old man on the side of the road. The hero is going down the road and meets this poor and insignificant person. The goal or lesson is for the hero to learn to respect everybody and to pay attention to the poorest person because that's where the key to his success will be.

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

You can't do it unless you can imagine it.

We were always dreaming of how it was going to be.

'Young Indiana Jones' was one of the happiest times I ever had, so I love television.

My success wasn't based on how I could push down everybody that was around me. My success was based on how much I could push everybody up.

Luke: Boy, it's lucky you have these compartments. Han: I use them for smuggling. I never thought I'd be smuggling myself in them. This is ridiculous.

Human nature means battling constantly between being completely self-absorbed and trying to be a communal creature. Nature makes you a communal creature. The ultimate single-minded, self-centered creature is a cancer cell. And mostly, we're not made up of cancer cells.

I like to say that films are never finished, they're only abandoned.

As the workplace becomes more specialized, from offices to medical centers to factories, teams of people must accomplish their work by collaborating with each other. In my work in filmmaking, we need talented individuals with technical skills, but their abilities to communicate and work with others are just as valuable.

If this were a fantasy world, there would be ten of me and we would each be doing what we wanted to do.

Working hard is very important. You're not going to get anywhere without working extremely hard.

Don't avoid the cliches - they are cliches because they work!

If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.

The older you get, the less seriously you take criticism. I've gotten to a point now where I ignore it completely. It's just not relevant to me anymore.

I'm aware that dialogue isn't my strength. I use it as a device. I don't particularly like dialogue which is part of the problem.

You have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever. We're one of the very few creatures that has a choice, and can intellectualize the process.

I like racing. I love the speed and I'm a very kinetic person in terms of filmmaking. I love the movement of film more than anything else.

The secret is not to give up hope. It's very hard not to because if you're really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.

For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.

In my films, all the great things are put together. It's not like one kind of ice cream but rather a very big Sundae.

Our system of education is locked in a time capsule. You want to say to the people in charge, 'You're not using today's tools! Wake up!'

It's very important not to do what your peers think you should do, not do what your parents think,your teachers or even your culture. Do what's inside of you.

That's the issue that I've been exploring: How did the Republic turn into the Empire? That's paralleled with: How did Anakin turn into Darth Vader? How does a good person go bad, and how does a democracy become a dictatorship? It isn't that the Empire conquered the Republic, it's that the Empire is the Republic.

Star Wars has always struck a chord with people. There are issues of loyalty, of friendship, of good and evil... The theme came from stories and ideas that have been around for thousands of years.

After a lot of struggling and sort of reflection I realized that the time you have to give is now, regardless of how old you are.

Any society begins by realizing that together, by helping each other, you can survive better than if you fight each other and compete with each other.