Quotes from J. J. Abrams

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.

Withholding things in a story is no good if you aren't building to something substantial. It becomes foreplay without the main event, and no one wants that.

I don't think anyone wants a movie on time that's not worth your time.

My mother is the coolest, most amazing person I know.

I've never done Twitter.

I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.

When I was a little kid - and even still - I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made - at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do magic.

I'm obsessed with things that are distinctly analogue.

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

It's a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling.

We live in an age of instant knowledge. And there's almost a sense of entitlement to that.

Making movies was more a reaction to not being chosen for sports. Other kids were out there playing at whatever; I was off making something blow up and filming it, or making a mould of my sister's head using alginating plaster.

As a director/writer/producer, all you ever want is to work with actors who make you look better, who make the work you do seem as good as it can be and even better than it is.

My work isn't any more important than anything else in the family

I've just been lucky to work on things that I felt would be cool to see. It's not that I had a strategy or anything.

When there's an authentic mystery, as opposed to just a question being asked, that's what makes you lean forward.

I am lucky, I'm the first to admit that.

You can never guess or assume what anyone is going to think.

I believe in anything that will engage the audience and make the story more effective.

I love stories where the impossible appears believable, plausible and real. Maybe it's silly, but it's one of the reasons Michael Crichton's writing always appealed to me: he took outlandish ideas and made them seem completely within the realm of possibility. I remember reading "Jurassic Park" and feeling like: "Oh, yeah -- no, that's totally happening right now. They're bringing back dinosaurs!"

Time built up everyone's expectations about the impending conflict between Luke and Vader. If "I am your father" had been in the first film, I don't know if it would have had the resonance. I actually don't know if it would have worked.

What I loved about the original trilogy is how real it felt. I still to this moment can't believe how it felt to look at the desert of what was supposed to be Tatooine and seeing these two droids walking along and no fantasy genre film had ever, in my experience, looked like that before. And suddenly this was real.

I'm an impatient guy and tend not to like to stay with one thing for a long time. I'll never be able to write as many scripts as I did for "Felicity" or "Alias" ever again. I'm just too impatient these days. I want to get on to the next project.

I'm working on the Star Wars script today and the people in my office have covered up all my windows with black paper. I guess they wanted to make sure no one could see what I was doing. It seems rather extreme.