J. J. Abrams Quotes

It's what happens. You love, then you lose, then you die. Even if you survive, you die.

I love working with the right actor, and if the right actor happens to be unknown, that should be allowed, too, I think.

Maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge. I realized that the white page is a magic box. Ultimately, the mistery box is all of us. Ubiquitous technologies. What comes next ? Mystery as catalyst for imagination.

I do feel like no matter what you're doing, whether it's music or writing a play or a poem or drawing a picture or painting something, that you're speaking to what is it you want to express, what is it you want to see.

Well, you know, going into any project, especially with a fan base as vocal and passionate as something as "Star Wars," you will have groups of people who will find issues with whatever it is you're doing. But our job was to tell the best story we could about characters that we loved, and we knew that we needed to go backwards to go forwards, and we needed to go back to a feeling and a place and a time.

I love the idea of anthropomorphizing machines. I love the idea of taking technology and giving it a personality.

I think admitting youre an addict is the first step towards recovery.

Directing's the best part. Whenever I've directed something, there's this feeling of demand and focus that I like. And secondly, it means that you've gotten through all the writing stuff, and the producing stuff, and casting, and prep, and all those stages that are seemingly endless. So directing is sort of the reward for all the work you put in before. And then there's the editing, which is another amazing stage of the process. It's incredible the moments you can create.

I feel like I learn every day how I can be a better producer or writer or storyteller. The thing that keeps me the most balanced is just going home every day and getting my ass kicked by my kids, and having a wife who is the most wonderfully/brutally honest person I've ever met. I think that that is always the first lens through which I see the world. For everything else, I'm just grateful for the people I work with.

I don't want to do something that is so inside that only die-hard fans will appreciate.

When I was a kid, it was a huge insult to be a geek. Now it's a point of pride in a weird way.

I'm literally open to any medium that will have me.

I have nothing against 3-D in theory. But I've also never run to the movies because something's in 3-D.

You know, we didn't want to kill anyone, but we knew that "Star Wars" is a generational tale. It always is. And for it to have some guts and some resonance and true stakes, I don't think that everyone could have come through the story unscathed.

The ability of a television series to make adjustments is something you've got to take advantage of.

I think when you're 10 years old, it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things.

Directing a movie precludes me from being involved in any greater way. But, the job was never to do more, it was always to enable. Sometimes as a producer, you're creating and writing it, or sometimes you're writing and directing it, or other times you're there from the very beginning.

I think you have a passion and an obsession for something when it's not necessarily ubiquitous.

It's not often that I read about actors that I'm going to be meeting. I get to read articles about actors who were going to come in, so I get to see someone and say, "Oh, I read that I was going to see you. It's very nice to see you."

Every hour that you spend doing something, even if you love it more than anything, you're not with your family. Every project that you take on, that's another choice.

I was never really a comic-book fanatic.

Mystery is more important than knowledge.

But I'm grateful for everyone who would want to read a spoiler because it means that they care and want to see the movie. I know what it feels like, as an enormous Star Wars fan myself.

I sort of love the idea of, you know, watching something and then having to wait for the next episode.

I quickly said that, because of my loyalty to 'Star Trek' and also just being a fan, I wouldn’t even want to be involved in the next version of those things. I declined any involvement very early on. I’d rather be in the audience not knowing what was coming, rather than being involved in the minutiae of making them.

I find that it's hard to fully examine one's life and not have faith be part of the discussion.

It's more important you learn what to make movies about than how to make movies

Pitching is always a weird, difficult thing.

I love movies with spectacle but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn't have to be a creature.

When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal.

Honestly I'm excited about the possibilities of what comes next, and the funny thing is, that is sort of what "Star Wars" is kind of about. I mean, I remember being 10 years old and seeing that movie and leaving the theater and feeling like, oh, my God, anything is possible. And I feel like anything is possible right now. I don't know what's next, but I look forward to it.

I do think that at a certain point, the reboot sequel mode has to give way to original ideas and back to a place where, you know, films are, you know, a medium and the cinema is a place you go to see something that is, you know, wholly new.

I hope to make movies that are so small they don't need to make anything to be profitable.

We went on the opening weekend [of Star Wars], a group of us went out and just popped into a couple theaters just to see people in the theater watching the movie, and it was incredibly gratifying just to see the thing out there being watched by people. And the reaction was more than we could've expected.

Well, when Kathy Kennedy, who is the president of Lucasfilm, came to me to ask if I'd be interested in working on this "Star Wars" movie, we talked about a young woman at the center of the story from the outset. And it was something that was always an important part of this movie.

'Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope' (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. That work was the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns had to our parents' generations, it left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films.