I have to stay interested. I can't do the same thing over and over again, which is why I don't do - I've made sequels, but it's the movies that are not sequels that I enjoy the most.

It is important to know who your friends are and to stay, remain loyal to your friends, despite what you hear, despite the mistakes that are made in friendships and misunderstandings that commonly occur, to be able to forgive and to move on, you have to be able to remember the values of friendship.

I was fifteen, or sixteen. I was in high school. I was spending a summer in California with my second cousins. And I wanted to be a director really bad. I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.

Audiences are harder to please if you're just giving them effects, but they're easy to please if it's a good story.

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.

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

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