Top 80 J.J. Abrams Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Pitching is always a weird, difficult thing.”

— J.J. Abrams

52. “I’m not as optimistic as Gene Roddenberry was. I fall somewhere in the middle. But as a romantic, I like to think things are going to get bigger rather than worse.”

— J.J. Abrams

53. “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.”

— J.J. Abrams

54. “I sort of love the idea of, you know, watching something and then having to wait for the next episode.”

— J.J. Abrams

55. “Whenever I’ve directed something, there’s this feeling of demand and focus that I like.”

— J.J. Abrams

56. “I try to work on shows that I would want to watch.”

— J.J. Abrams

57. “I don’t think I have a signature.”

— J.J. Abrams

58. “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.”

— J.J. Abrams

59. “I’m literally open to any medium that will have me.”

— J.J. Abrams

60. “Well, we knew that we wanted to tell a story that made bold choices, and one of those bold choices was meeting a storm trooper and seeing who this person was. That’s something that had never been done.”

— J.J. Abrams

61. “Obviously with the Internet and increased access to other means of watching shows, the audience has dispersed and is all over the place and that is a challenge.”

— J.J. Abrams

62. “It is an incredible thing to see how many crazy things get thrown out that people then often write commentaries about how happy they are or how disappointed they are about something that’s completely false. But, it’s a lot of noise, frankly.”

— J.J. Abrams

63. “People never know what they want, though everyone says they do. If they did, nobody would ever be surprised.”

— J.J. Abrams

64. “To be a self rewritten from a lost first draft.”

— J.J. Abrams

65. “The Internet now provides an immediate and very clear consensus of what it is that the audience is experiencing. It’s something that you should never let lead you, and yet at the same time, you should never ignore it.”

— J.J. Abrams

66. “I may be even more grateful to George Lucas now than I was as a kid.”

— J.J. Abrams

67. “Well, when Kathy Kennedy, who is the president of Lucasfilm, came to me to ask if I’d be interested in working on this “Star Wars” movie, we talked about a young woman at the center of the story from the outset. And it was something that was always an important part of this movie.”

— J.J. Abrams

68. “I guess the idea of not wanting to choose to direct a film, for which I’ve not read a script. It’s a tough decision to make without seeing any pages. That’s not to say that I don’t have all the faith in the world in the spectacular writers.”

— J.J. Abrams

69. “I feel blessed that I get to be part of entertaining people in any capacity.”

— J.J. Abrams

70. “You know, we didn’t want to kill anyone, but we knew that “Star Wars” is a generational tale. It always is. And for it to have some guts and some resonance and true stakes, I don’t think that everyone could have come through the story unscathed.”

— J.J. Abrams

71. “What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin.”

— J.J. Abrams

72. “I was just like, “I want to make a decent 2-D movie.” I was so worried that, instead of being a decent 2-D movie, it would have been a bad 3-D one.”

— J.J. Abrams

73. “All the times I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of a show that’s actually gotten on the air, it’s always that same mixture of excitement and utter fear.”

— J.J. Abrams

74. “The ability of a television series to make adjustments is something you’ve got to take advantage of.”

— J.J. Abrams

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

— J.J. Abrams

76. “Directing a movie precludes me from being involved in any greater way. But, the job was never to do more, it was always to enable. Sometimes as a producer, you’re creating and writing it, or sometimes you’re writing and directing it, or other times you’re there from the very beginning.”

— J.J. Abrams

77. “I’m obsessed with things that are distinctly analogue.”

— J.J. Abrams

78. “The magic that works, to me, is the magic that feels completely grounded and real and tangible.”

— J.J. Abrams

79. “I was never really a comic-book fanatic.”

— J.J. Abrams

80. “It’s not often that I read about actors that I’m going to be meeting. I get to read articles about actors who were going to come in, so I get to see someone and say, “Oh, I read that I was going to see you. It’s very nice to see you.””

— J.J. Abrams

81. “Cameron Crowe is someone who I’ve admired for so long, and I’ve been friends with him for many years, and I’ve wanted to work with him so badly that I just never stopped bothering him about writing a script that would be for a pilot.”

— J.J. Abrams

82. “All that ink, all that pigment, all that desperate action to preserve that which had been created – it is valuable because story is a fragile and ephemeral thing on its own, a thing that is easily effaced or disappeared or destroyed, and it is worth preserving.”

— J.J. Abrams

83. “He can see the stars; he no longer has a need for the constellations.”

— J.J. Abrams

84. “It occurs to me that hearts and souls and lives can themselves be sites of unimaginable suffering.”

— J.J. Abrams

85. “Better a change than an end.”

— J.J. Abrams