Top 200 Steven Spielberg Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.”

— Steven Spielberg

Featured in: Individuality Quotes

2. “I love editing. It’s one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.”

— Steven Spielberg

Featured in: Filmmaking Quotes

3. “Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive.”

— Steven Spielberg

Featured in: Filmmaking Quotes

4. “All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that’s why it takes so long.”

— Steven Spielberg

5. “I don’t dream at night, I dream at day, I dream all day; I’m dreaming for living.”

— Steven Spielberg

6. “You shouldn’t dream your film, you should make it!”

— Steven Spielberg

7. “I dream for a living.”

— Steven Spielberg

8. “Every time I go to a movie, it’s magic, no matter what the movie’s about.”

— Steven Spielberg

9. “You can be great just by being yourself.”

— Steven Spielberg

10. “You’re not alone, are you? Because I’m here.”

— Steven Spielberg

11. “There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.”

— Steven Spielberg

12. “Everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner.”

— Steven Spielberg

13. “All of us every single year, we’re a different person. I don’t think we’re the same person all our lives.”

— Steven Spielberg

14. “I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.”

— Steven Spielberg

15. “The public has an appetite for anything about imagination – anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.”

— Steven Spielberg

16. “Humans are the only hunters who kill when not hungry.”

— Steven Spielberg

17. “Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.”

— Steven Spielberg

18. “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.”

— Steven Spielberg

19. “The turning point in my career was Jaws. It was a turning point because I was a director-for-hire before Jaws and because it was such a big hit I could do any movie I wanted and Hollywood just wrote me a cheque.”

— Steven Spielberg

20. “Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.”

— Steven Spielberg

21. “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.”

— Steven Spielberg

22. “Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else.”

— Steven Spielberg

23. “My problem is that my imagination won’t turn off. I wake up so excited I can’t eat breakfast. I’ve never run out of energy. It’s not like OPEC oil; I don’t worry about a premium going on my energy. It’s just always been there. I got it from my mom.”

— Steven Spielberg

24. “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.”

— Steven Spielberg

25. “All presidents swear an oath to the Constitution to keep this country united, and when the country fell apart, Lincoln had to put it back together again, with a lot of help. But he bore total responsibility.”

— Steven Spielberg

26. “If the world ran the way a crew runs a set, we’d have a better, more progressive world.”

— Steven Spielberg

27. “When I don’t have a movie, I don’t take a job just for the sake of working. I just sit it out until I find something I’m passionate about.”

— Steven Spielberg

28. “The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II.”

— Steven Spielberg

29. “You can’t intellectually purge yourself of who you are. Whatever that is, it’s going to come out in the wash, the film wash. What you are is going to be relevant, if not to yourself, to the movies you make.”

— Steven Spielberg

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

— Steven Spielberg

31. “My dad took me to my first movie. It was ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ in 1952, a movie of such scale it was actually a traumatic experience.”

— Steven Spielberg

32. “It is important to know who your friends are and to stay, remain loyal to your friends, despite what you hear, despite the mistakes that are made in friendships and misunderstandings that commonly occur, to be able to forgive and to move on, you have to be able to remember the values of friendship.”

— Steven Spielberg

33. “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.”

— Steven Spielberg

34. “There’s no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That’s clearly going to show what kind of a character you’re telling a story about.”

— Steven Spielberg

35. “It is not my job to compare my movies. I don’t like to compare my films with other movies because I don’t really have that perspective. It is an intellectual exercise, but it doesn’t intuitively come to me.”

— Steven Spielberg

36. “All through my career I’ve done what I can to discover new talent and give them a start.”

— Steven Spielberg

37. “The thing that I’m just scared to death of is that someday I’m going to wake up and bore somebody with a film.”

— Steven Spielberg

38. “I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven’t ever directed a film where I haven’t made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.”

— Steven Spielberg

39. “Before I go off and direct a movie, I always look at four films. They tend to be The Seven Samurai, Lawrence Of Arabia, It’s A Wonderful Life and The Searchers.”

— Steven Spielberg

40. “One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.”

— Steven Spielberg

Featured in: Volunteer Quotes

41. “The older I get, the more I look at movies as a moving miracle.”

— Steven Spielberg

42. “Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director’s point of view.”

— Steven Spielberg

43. “I felt like an alien. I always felt like I never belonged to any group that I wanted to belong to.”

— Steven Spielberg

44. “It all starts with the script: it’s not worth taking myself away from my family if I don’t have something I’m really passionate about.”

— Steven Spielberg

45. “I had to get over my fear of running through the world naked and learn to say ‘take me or leave me.’”

— Steven Spielberg

46. “I made ‘Saving Private Ryan’ for my father. He’s the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.”

— Steven Spielberg

47. “When I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it’s you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.”

— Steven Spielberg

48. “Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.”

— Steven Spielberg

49. “I hate that people think it’s wrong to say you’re inspired by Jaws or by Raiders Of The Lost Ark. You’re allowed to be.”

— Steven Spielberg

50. “I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.”

— Steven Spielberg