Top 100 Steven Soderbergh Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I’m a grinder. I’ll beat you because I will not sleep.”

— Steven Soderbergh

2. “When things go right it’s hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it’s really easy.”

— Steven Soderbergh

3. “The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die – if you are found wanting over a period of time, you’ve either got to change what you’re doing or find something else to do.”

— Steven Soderbergh

4. “All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They’re fascinated with incentives.”

— Steven Soderbergh

5. “You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you’re going to get crushed.”

— Steven Soderbergh

6. “Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Dr Pepper is my caffeine delivery system of choice.”

— Steven Soderbergh

7. “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.”

— Steven Soderbergh

8. “A Movie That Costs Only $1.6 Million Doesn’t Have to Be a Cultural Event to Turn a Profit.”

— Steven Soderbergh

9. “I’m not a snob. If I feel like there’s a star that’s the best person for that role, then that’s who I get.”

— Steven Soderbergh

10. “If you’re sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you’ll just become paralysed.”

— Steven Soderbergh

11. “I want to form a political party that’s based entirely on what music people listen to. To me, it’s a much better barometer of what they think and feel than their political stance.”

— Steven Soderbergh

12. “You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.”

— Steven Soderbergh

13. “There is sadness of when you’re watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.”

— Steven Soderbergh

14. “Ego is something that everybody, creative especially, has to grapple with. You need enough ego to keep going but not so much ego that you’re deaf or blind, that you’re making a mistake and can’t fix the course.”

— Steven Soderbergh

15. “I always have a plan, but then I’m always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone’s ready to make a radical left turn if necessary.”

— Steven Soderbergh

16. “Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but thats not reality, its just another aesthetic form of fiction.”

— Steven Soderbergh

17. “The key is, if youre not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.”

— Steven Soderbergh

18. “You can’t change who you are, so I think that the only thing you can do is just never talk to people about stuff and then hope that maybe does something.”

— Steven Soderbergh

19. “When a film like Chris Nolan’s Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It’s dead.”

— Steven Soderbergh

20. “The brief flashbacks are sun-kissed, summery and optimistic. It’s the only place in the movie you will see red, yellow, orange, or any vibrant colors.”

— Steven Soderbergh

21. “Never done an explosion, but I have had explosive diarrhea, and that was very, very real. Good thing I have my trailer.”

— Steven Soderbergh

22. “In the land of ideas, you are always renting.”

— Steven Soderbergh

23. “Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there’s nothing that Godard hasn’t already done. You can’t do a single thing that Godard hasn’t already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable.”

— Steven Soderbergh

24. “I’m not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I’ll chop limbs off. I’ll put an arm where a leg should be. I’ll do anything.”

— Steven Soderbergh

25. “I feel I need to really think about whether there’s a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don’t think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.”

— Steven Soderbergh

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

— Steven Soderbergh

27. “People like Chris Nolan are shooting isolated sequences in IMAX. Those cameras are the size of a Volkswagen.”

— Steven Soderbergh

28. “My first three movies, I didn’t start editing until we were finished shooting. That’s unthinkable to me now.”

— Steven Soderbergh

29. “Men tend to define themselves by what they do, and so if you’re dealing with a character who’s trying to figure that out, or multiple characters, then there’s something there for guys, too.”

— Steven Soderbergh

30. “I was thinking that people have to believe you’re crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist. If you’re wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there’s no context for people to look at what you do.”

— Steven Soderbergh

31. “I’m probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It’s rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.”

— Steven Soderbergh

32. “I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn’t interest me as much.”

— Steven Soderbergh

33. “I guess I just look at talent as a very subjective thing. I mean, if you never tried playing an oboe, how do you know you’re not the most talented oboe player ever? The point is that if you don’t love it, then it doesn’t matter.”

— Steven Soderbergh

34. “People are sort of numb to watching violence, but sexual activity is still as strong as it ever was in terms of generating response.”

— Steven Soderbergh

35. “You got to deal with reviews the same way you deal with your views, which I a long time ago stopped reading because the point is if you believe the good ones you have to believe the bad ones. It’s kind of all or nothing.”

— Steven Soderbergh

36. “If you’re not smart enough to know what Fidel meant during the Cuban revolution, that – when they were on the Granma – Fidel was already a rock star in Cuba, and how important that was to the indigenous population, then you’re not paying attention.”

— Steven Soderbergh

37. “I recently decided that I’m not an originator. I’m a synthesist.”

— Steven Soderbergh

38. “We all get outraged by things and there are things that make us angry and maybe for a while we get angry enough to actually go do something about it.”

— Steven Soderbergh

39. “A movie is something you see, cinema is something that’s made.”

— Steven Soderbergh

40. “I like a lot of different kinds of movies, I like a lot of different kinds of paintings.”

— Steven Soderbergh

41. “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.”

— Steven Soderbergh

42. “Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.”

— Steven Soderbergh

43. “Truth and facts have to trump partisanship. There has to be something that’s true regardless of what your angle is on it.”

— Steven Soderbergh

44. “I grew up mostly in the South, and there’s definitely something about the South that’s different from the North. When people ask me where I’m from, I say Louisiana. I spent more years there than anywhere else.”

— Steven Soderbergh

45. “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.”

— Steven Soderbergh

46. “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.”

— Steven Soderbergh

47. “In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.”

— Steven Soderbergh

48. “I guess I didn’t feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things – not knowing what that would be.”

— Steven Soderbergh

49. “Surprisingly, I don’t throw away that much. I don’t move forward with a lot of things unless they’re going somewhere. You also have to remember that when you’re working with other artists, you have to be really careful about how you deal with that stuff.”

— Steven Soderbergh

50. “I was lucky that I was getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of films, and I was liking them all. So it seemed logical to me that you could – as in the style of the studio directors of the 30s and 40s – jump from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction.”

— Steven Soderbergh