Top 200 Steven Spielberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I don’t think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.”

— Steven Spielberg

102. “You can’t start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.”

— Steven Spielberg

103. “The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years.”

— Steven Spielberg

104. “He never gave up. And he does that for us.”

— Steven Spielberg

105. “I love history, so I do a lot of movies about history.”

— Steven Spielberg

106. “I always think if it’s a good story, the audience can’t wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting.”

— Steven Spielberg

107. “I quit college so fast I didn’t even clean out my locker.”

— Steven Spielberg

108. “I’ve always sort of time-locked and mind-blocked myself in my 30s, and that’s always the age I feel.”

— Steven Spielberg

109. “I think in terms of chapters. Every time I finish a movie, it’s a chapter. When one of my kids graduates from school, that’s a chapter.”

— Steven Spielberg

110. “It’s still a mystery to me, but even though my mother was like an older sister to me, I kind of put her up on a pedestal.”

— Steven Spielberg

111. “Audience members are only concerned about the story, the concept, the bells and whistles and the noise that a popular film starts to make even before it’s popular. So audiences will not be drawn to the technology; they’ll be drawn to the story. And I hope it always remains that way.”

— Steven Spielberg

112. “The essence of what it is to be American is the deep moral urge to be free, to freely express yourself and have the right to do so, and to look at all people as equals.”

— Steven Spielberg

113. “All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I draw from creatively today.”

— Steven Spielberg

114. “My early exposure to all the leviathans of the Saturday matinee creature features inspired me, when I grew up, to make ‘Jurassic Park.’”

— Steven Spielberg

115. “I made ‘Empire of the Sun’ in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.”

— Steven Spielberg

116. “In the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like Kubrick’s vision. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery, of humour and contradictions. It was a gift to us, and now it’s a legacy.”

— Steven Spielberg

117. “I love Rambo but I think it’s potentially a very dangerous movie. It changes history in a frightening way.”

— Steven Spielberg

118. “I did 50 takes on Robert Shaw assembling the Greener Gun on ‘Jaws.’ The shark wasn’t working, so I just kept shooting to make the production report look like we were accomplishing something and to keep cast and crew from going crazy from boredom. It was a strategic indulgence.”

— Steven Spielberg

119. “You look at war as something that is putting your best friend in jeopardy. You are responsible for the person in front of you and the person behind you, and the person to the left of you and the person to the right of you.”

— Steven Spielberg

120. “I’m 62 years old. Am I old enough to win a lifetime achievement award? Yes, I am. Thank you very much.”

— Steven Spielberg

121. “I’ll probably never win an Oscar, but I’ll sure have a lot of fun! I really believe that movies are the great escape.”

— Steven Spielberg

122. “I missed my dad a lot growing up, even though we were together as a family. My dad was really a workaholic. And he was always working.”

— Steven Spielberg

123. “Movies are always in a state of locomotion. You start with a general idea of how it should feel and then you find you’ve got a runaway train. You have to race to catch up: the movie is telling you what it wants to become, and when that happens there’s no greater feeling.”

— Steven Spielberg

124. “One of my daughters is a competitive jumper, we live with horses, we have stables on our property. But I don’t ride. I observe, and I worry.”

— Steven Spielberg

125. “The baby boomers owe a big debt of gratitude to the parents and grandparents – who we haven’t given enough credit to anyway – for giving us another generation.”

— Steven Spielberg

126. “I’ve always wanted to tell a story about Lincoln. I saw a paternal father figure; I saw someone who was completely, stubbornly committed to his ideals, to his vision.”

— Steven Spielberg

127. “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.”

— Steven Spielberg

128. “I get very, very anxious on the set. I have a thousand ideas and I don’t censor myself. I wind up cutting some of them out in the editing room. I shoot needless footage and then don’t use it later on in the process.”

— Steven Spielberg

129. “I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.”

— Steven Spielberg

130. “I don’t think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it’s certainly worth a try.”

— Steven Spielberg

131. “I basically took something that was extremely erotic and very intentional, and I reduced it to a simple kiss. I got a lot of criticism for that.”

— Steven Spielberg

132. “I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild.”

— Steven Spielberg

133. “I’d rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday.”

— Steven Spielberg

134. “I’m very collaborative with everybody on the set.”

— Steven Spielberg

135. “I feel there is no substitute for going out to the movies. There is nothing like it.”

— Steven Spielberg

136. “In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who’s never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don’t look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.”

— Steven Spielberg

137. “You never really know how good of a leader you are until there is something there is lead us to, toward or through or to overcome.”

— Steven Spielberg

138. “I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there’s film going through the camera.”

— Steven Spielberg

139. “People often tell me how much they love the digital skies that we obviously painted for ‘War Horse.’ Well, there’s not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced – but it was definitely challenging at times.”

— Steven Spielberg

140. “An animal has no intellectual capacity to justify or to find reasons to exist. An animal just exists because it’s the natural thing to do.”

— Steven Spielberg

141. “There are so many rumours about so many of us in the public eye. Sometimes it’s too hard to deny what is not true.”

— Steven Spielberg

142. “I would love to do a musical. I would love that. I would have to find the right book, the right story, but some day I’m going to make one. I would really like to go off and direct a musical. That’s what I would really like to do when I grow up.”

— Steven Spielberg

143. “I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.”

— Steven Spielberg

144. “When I was younger, all I cared about was what people thought of me and my films. Now I care less about catering, hand-serving, hand-feeding the audience. I’ve gotten to the point now in my life where I’m serving myself.”

— Steven Spielberg

145. “I have made almost as many films in England as I have in America. I will come back to England again and again.”

— Steven Spielberg

146. “Tracking action without cutting is the least jarring method of placing the audience into a real-time experience where they are the ones making the subtle choices of where and when to look.”

— Steven Spielberg

147. “I think all directors should be animators...”

— Steven Spielberg

148. “I’m not really interested in making money.”

— Steven Spielberg

149. “I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I’d rather do it old-style.”

— Steven Spielberg

150. “It starts with the writer-it’s a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word.”

— Steven Spielberg