Steven Spielberg Quotes

I am a very impatient director.

I'd love to build a company that will continue to make movies well beyond me someday. And I'd like to help start something great, even investing in it myself.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

People can relate to horses. Horses, I think, are basically in our genetic history. Horses were part of our culture, part of our collective society, for hundreds of years, and so, the horse is one of the most familiar animals to people of any race or culture or country.

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.

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

I was afraid of small spaces and I was afraid of the tree outside my window, and I had all these phobias. I think many kids have those phobias, but I probably had more than most.

From a very young age, my parents taught me the most important lesson of my whole life: They taught me how to listen. They taught me how to listen to everybody before I made up my own mind. When you listen, you learn. You absorb like a sponge - and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time.

You never really know how good of a leader you are until there is something there is lead us to, toward or through or to overcome.

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

Unprotected sex just feels better in a Waffle House bathroom.

I'm not really interested in making money. That's always come as the result of success, but it's not been my goal.

He never gave up. And he does that for us

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.

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

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.

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

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

Lincoln believed in the American people.

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.

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.

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

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.

I make some movies for myself. I do that sometimes when the subject matter is very sensitive and very personal and I really can't imagine that I'm an audience member. I would lose myself too much if I thought of myself as the audience. There are other types of genre films that I need to be able to direct from the audience, to be right next to you watching the picture being made.

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

I don't want to quit. I've always said that Clint Eastwood is one of my best friends. I've known Clint for many years and we have almost a jokey relationship about retirement. I always say: "OK Clint, are you ready to retire this year?" And he always says: "No, are you?" So, I'm waiting for the phone call where Clint says he's hanging up his spurs. That's never going to happen. If it doesn't happen for Clint, it won't happen for me.

I think the secret of great acting is that you have to bring your imagination to the party. You have to have a great imagination and you have to bring it every day when you're working. Your imagination and your skills as an actor are what see you through, not what you're wearing or where you are.

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

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.

All through my career I've done what I can to discover new talent and give them a start.

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.

The turning point in my career was Jaws. It was a turning point because I was a director-for-hire before Jaws and because it was such a big hit I could do any movie I wanted and Hollywood just wrote me a cheque.

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.

Wherever you are, I will find you and I will bring you home

Movies principally require the best of everybody, all at the same time, being the best they can be. Not just like five people being the best they've ever been, and 10 people not being the best they could be. It's like if everybody is either doing their greatest work, or the whole house of cards falls apart.

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

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.

There is something that you have that no one else ever had ... When you watch Kirk's [Douglas] performance in anything, in anything he's ever done, you cannot take your eyes off of him. It's not possible to look away from him.

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.

I've just always had a personal fascination with the myth of Abraham Lincoln. And once you start to read about him and the Civil War and everything leading up to the Civil War, you start to understand that the myth is created when we think we understand a character and we reduce him to a kind of cultural national stereotype.

I don't do the running commentary as the movie's playing. I think you should be able to watch the movie without listening to me talk while the movies playing.

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

I've always been very hopeful which I guess isn't strange coming from me. I don't want to call myself an optimist. I want to say that I've always been full of hope. I've never lost that. I have a lot of hope for this country and for the entire world. . .

I think all directors should be animators.

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.

Twenty years from now, there will still be a square screen, maybe even larger, and people will be sitting in a large, dark space, and they won't know each other unless they bring friends along.

It [Lincoln movie] had nothing to do with politics. It had nothing to do with holding a mirror up to the way we conduct our business on Capitol Hill. This was meant to be a story, a Lincoln portrait if you will. I think any time is the right time for a very compelling story, any time.