Quotes from Steven Spielberg

I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.

You have many years ahead of you to create the dreams that we can't even imagine dreaming. You have done more for the collective unconscious of this planet than you will ever know.

I think that is the secret of great acting. You have to bring your imagination to the party. You've got to have a great imagination.

Science fiction really is the only genre that lets you use your imagination without limitations.

This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we're not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally.

I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters.

I've always been interested in how we survive and how resourceful we are as Americans.

The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.

I just think that the qualities of leadership are unknown even to the leader until he's tested and given a challenge.

There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.

Because television doesn't offer the kind of budget that a movie offers, you've got to be a little more careful where you spend the money to put the fiction in science.

This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.

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.

Most of my presumptions about a production are usually wrong.

If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.

Because of how much movies cost, it's dangerous to be experimental on one film after the other. But we can experiment with television. We can do things that are fringe and bring ideas to the table that are offbeat and original.

I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

Fathering is a major job, but I need both things in my life: my job to be a director, and my kids to direct me.

I thought film was more important than life itself for many years. But I was naive to the world until my first child was born in 1985.

You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.