Quotes from Steven Soderbergh

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

When you have no one in your life who you can call and say, "I'm scared," then your life is unfulfilling. You need somebody you can trust enough to say, "I need help."

So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it's fast and sometimes it's slower, and maybe what's happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it's gotten to the point where I can't hear between the beats anymore and it's just a hum.

You're supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you're not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

The problem was me. I was...I was a pathological liar. Or am, I should say. Lying is like alcoholism, one is always "recovering".

When people say that moviegoing is dead, I go, 'OK, so the makers of 'Get Out' should've sold that movie to a platform? Then they don't have this insane, crazy success theatrically all over the world.'

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.

I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you - you want them to just be themselves.

My working life is me doing what I want to do. This is that. I've made movies that people don't go to see.

I don't have any kind of ideology that precludes me from moving in one direction or another. I just want creative autonomy and I want at least an opportunity that it's going to be seen.

I'm a big believer that if there's something you really want to do, don't walk away because of the deal.

Maybe I'll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

If you can find interesting ways to be clear, you're really onto something.

If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.

I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

You're supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you're not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.