Discover the essence of Steven Spielberg through this collection of 175 inspiring quotes. Gain insights into the mind of one of the greatest filmmakers of our time as he shares his wisdom, creativity, and passion for storytelling. From his iconic movies to his groundbreaking techniques, Spielberg’s words will ignite your imagination and fuel your own creative journey.
Steven Spielberg Quotes
1- “Sadly, racial, ethnic, and cultural hatred and intolerance are not just history, they are current events.” – Steven Spielberg
2- “When I felt like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.” – Steven Spielberg
3- “I had no choice. It was just something that happened. I was always looking for ways to act out, and I got a camera and it acted out for me.” – Steven Spielberg
4- “Dyslexia “it is more common than you can imagine, you are not alone.” – Steven Spielberg
5- “The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years.” – Steven Spielberg
6- “My father had many, many veterans over to the house, and the older I got the more I appreciated their sacrifice.” – Steven Spielberg
7- “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
8- “I love my kids as individuals, not as a herd, and I do have a herd of children: I have seven kids.” – Steven Spielberg
9- “History opens up new worlds to film-makers all the time.” – Steven Spielberg
10- “I simply adore ‘The Simpsons.’ I go to bed in a ‘Simpsons’ T-shirt.” – Steven Spielberg
11- “The work that I’m proudest of is the work that I’m most afraid of.” – Steven Spielberg
12- “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
13- “I don’t make unconventional stories; I don’t make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.” – Steven Spielberg
14- “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
15- “People have forgotten how to tell a story.” – Steven Spielberg
16- “I still have pretty much the same fears I had as a kid. I’m not sure I’d want to give them up; a lot of these insecurities fuel the movies I make.” – Steven Spielberg
17- “I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened.” – Steven Spielberg
18- “I think the greatest thing about DVD is the quality of sound and picture; the real estate to put more extras on; and, my favorite point is it stores quietly in very subtle places in your home .” – Steven Spielberg
19- “I’m certainly hoping that 3D gets to the point where people do not notice it because once they stop noticing it, it just becomes another tool and an aid to help tell a story.” – Steven Spielberg
20- “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
21- “I am an American Jew and aware of the sensitivities involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” – Steven Spielberg
22- “Every movie you’re going to forget that it’s 3D whether it’s widescreen or whatever it is, you’re going to forget everything if the movie is working. If the movie doesn’t work or if the movie generically doesn’t work then immediately you start to pick apart whatever has contributed to that.” – Steven Spielberg
23- “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
24- “Everybody who works for Amblin Television has to do five jobs.” – Steven Spielberg
25- “I don’t really have a schedule of when I want to show my children my movies.” – Steven Spielberg
26- “I’ve always sort of time-locked and mind-blocked myself in my 30s, and that’s always the age I feel.” – Steven Spielberg
27- “I feel like Ive been engaged to the British Empire since 1980 and tonight you have given me the ring knighthood.” – Steven Spielberg
28- “The only movie that I would ever even consider retrofitting is the first ‘Jurassic Park,’ which I think would look pretty spectacular in 3D. That’s the only one of my films that I would consider doing in 3D.” – Steven Spielberg
29- “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
30- “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
31- “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
32- “If I weren’t a director, I would want to be a film composer.” – Steven Spielberg
33- “For one thing, I don’t think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.” – Steven Spielberg
34- “My dad took me to my first movie.” – Steven Spielberg
35- “Audiences are harder to please if you’re just giving them effects, but they’re easy to please if it’s a good story.” – Steven Spielberg
36- “And I may often question choices I make as a producer. But I’ve never questioned the choices I make as a director.” – Steven Spielberg
37- “I would lose myself too much if I thought of myself as the audience.” – Steven Spielberg
38- “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
39- “I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go – ethical, moral limiters.” – Steven Spielberg
40- “As a Jew I am aware of how important the existence of Israel is for the survival of us all. And because I am proud of being Jewish, I am worried by the growing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the world.” – Steven Spielberg
41- “I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn’t often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.” – Steven Spielberg
42- “All I have to do is pose for a picture and I’m getting married to the person standing next to me.” – Steven Spielberg
43- “I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story.” – Steven Spielberg
44- “History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.” – Steven Spielberg
45- “A lot of the films I’ve made probably could have worked just as well 50 years ago, and that’s just because I have a lot of old-fashion values.” – Steven Spielberg
46- “So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it’s hard, because everybody has style. You can’t help it.” – Steven Spielberg
47- “I basically went into business for myself. But it never amounted to anything. I learned a lot about editing and dubbing by watching all the professionals do it, but I never got a job out of my imposition.” – Steven Spielberg
48- “I always like to play with my kids. I always have the time to do that. That’s my priority, always has been, so just interacting with my kids, and being with them is great.” – Steven Spielberg
49- “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jihadism have nothing to do with each other.” – Steven Spielberg
50- “I guess my first digital movie was ‘Tintin’ because ‘Tintin’ has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It’s 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I’m still planning to shoot everything on film.” – Steven Spielberg
51- “I think every film I make that puts characters in jeopardy is me purging my own fears, sadly only to re-engage with them shortly after the release of the picture. I’ll never make enough films to purge them all.” – Steven Spielberg
52- “My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.” – Steven Spielberg
53- “I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.” – Steven Spielberg
54- “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
55- “This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times…” – Steven Spielberg
56- “I’ve discovered I’ve got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.” – Steven Spielberg
57- “I don’t drink coffee. I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my entire life. That’s something you probably don’t know about me. I’ve hated the taste since I was a kid.” – Steven Spielberg
58- “I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.” – Steven Spielberg
59- “The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.” – Steven Spielberg
60- “Before statehood was achieved, Syria and Egypt had their tanks and military equipment lined up to invade Tel Aviv and destroy it; but the Israelis scrambled together an air force, some of it from old Second World War Messerschmidts, and the invasion was halted.” – Steven Spielberg
61- “When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.” – Steven Spielberg
62- “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
63- “Kurosawa is the pictorial Shakespeare of our time.” – Steven Spielberg
64- “I am a very impatient director.” – Steven Spielberg
65- “I think that the perceived downs in my own career come from just managing my time and not feeling that I have enough time for my family or my friends. You could put that in the personal life category but it’s all one category because I’ve got to balance my family.” – Steven Spielberg
66- “When I grow up, I still want to be a director.” – Steven Spielberg
67- “Audrey gave more than she ever got. The whole world is going to miss her.” – Steven Spielberg
68- “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
69- “I compose the frame literally with the camera. Unless it makes a story point.” – Steven Spielberg
70- “The only time I have a good hunch the audience is going to be there is when I make the sequel to ‘Jurassic Park’ or I make another Indiana Jones movie. I know I’ve got a good shot at getting an audience on opening night. Everything else that is striking out into new territory is a crap shoot.” – Steven Spielberg
72- “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
73- “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
74- “I love history, so I do a lot of movies about history.” – Steven Spielberg
75- “I wouldn’t have filmed The Color Purple if the book had been a big fat novel. The reason I read it is because it is thin.” – Steven Spielberg
76- “If movies generically don’t work, you immediately start to pick apart what ingredients contributed to that. If any movie is working, hopefully how it was made will be the least of your concern. You’ll only want to have a god time.” – Steven Spielberg
77- “I dream for a living. Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make.” – Steven Spielberg
78- “The love we do not show here on Earth is the only thing that hurts us in the after-life.” – Steven Spielberg
79- “For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.” – Steven Spielberg
80- “Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years.” – Steven Spielberg
81- “In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible.” – Steven Spielberg
82- “Whether in success or in failure, I’m proud of every single movie I’ve ever directed.” – Steven Spielberg
83- “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
84- “I think all directors should be animators…” – Steven Spielberg
85- “I love Rambo but I think it’s potentially a very dangerous movie. It changes history in a frightening way.” – Steven Spielberg
86- “When war comes, two things happen – profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.” – Steven Spielberg
87- “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
88- “I don’t do the running commentary as the movie’s playing. I think you should be able to watch the movie without listening to me talk while the movies playing.” – Steven Spielberg
89- “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
90- “Twenty years from now, there will still be a square screen, maybe even larger, and people will be sitting in a large, dark space, and they won’t know each other unless they bring friends along.” – Steven Spielberg
91- “I didn’t read reviews earlier in my career, but I read them now as I’m older. I read them all.” – Steven Spielberg
92- “I have never before, in my long and eclectic career, been gifted with such an abundance of natural beauty as I experienced filming ‘War Horse’ on Dartmoor.” – Steven Spielberg
93- “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
94- “The only time I’m totally happy is when I’m watching films or making them.” – Steven Spielberg
95- “Television has a different biorhythm than movies. I love the biorhythm of TV.” – Steven Spielberg
96- “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
97- “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
98- “All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I draw from creatively today.” – Steven Spielberg
99- “Some movies I make for myself. I just sort of make them for myself. I do that sometimes when the subject matter is very sensitive and very personal and I really can’t imagine I’m an audience.” – Steven Spielberg
100- “I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That’s never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad’s 8-millimeter movie camera.” – Steven Spielberg
101- “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
102- “I feel I’m all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.” – Steven Spielberg
103- “Cell phones tend to bring us more inside of our lives whereas movies offer a chance to escape, so there are two competing forces.” – Steven Spielberg
104- “I think the secret of great acting is that you have to bring your imagination to the party. You have to have a great imagination and you have to bring it every day when you’re working. Your imagination and your skills as an actor are what see you through, not what you’re wearing or where you are.” – Steven Spielberg
105- “Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life.” – Steven Spielberg
106- “From the day I started to think politically and to develop my own moral values, from my earliest youth, I have been an ardent defender of Israel.” – Steven Spielberg
107- “Lincoln’s leadership is based on a number of precepts, but my favorite one is that he acted in the name, and for the good, of the people.” – Steven Spielberg
108- “I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.” – Steven Spielberg
109- “I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it’s really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it.” – Steven Spielberg
110- “Like, I took no poetic license with ‘Schindler’s List’ because that was historical, factual documents.” – Steven Spielberg
111- “You know, I don’t really do that much looking inside me when I’m working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.” – Steven Spielberg
112- “Even if I’d had a really happy relationship with my father and there was no emotional hiatus for a decade and a half, I probably would still have made some of the same choices for movies that I’ve made.” – Steven Spielberg
113- “I felt like an alien. I always felt like I never belonged to any group that I wanted to belong to.” – Steven Spielberg
114- “I’m 62 years old. Am I old enough to win a lifetime achievement award? Yes, I am. Thank you very much.” – Steven Spielberg
115- “Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood – these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies out of Hollywood. It’s disastrous.” – Steven Spielberg
116- “Godzilla was the most masterful of all dinosaur movies because it made you believe it was really happening.” – Steven Spielberg
117- “Fathering is a major job, but I need both things in my life: my job to be a director, and my kids to direct me.” – Steven Spielberg
118- “There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating. It’s bound to try a man’s soul.” – Steven Spielberg
119- “I’m not in a race with anybody to make the biggest hit movie anymore. I am just trying to tell stories that I can stay interested in for the two years it takes me to supervise the writing and to direct them.” – Steven Spielberg
120- “I’m not a great man to my children. I’m just ‘Pop.’ The more involved I am with my kids, it keeps my head flat on top.” – Steven Spielberg
121- “Once scouting fully opens its doors to all who desire the same experience that so fully enriched me as a young person, I will be happy to reconsider a role on the advisory board.” – Steven Spielberg
122- “I can’t describe it, what I’m feeling and what I’m thinking. This means something. This is important.” – Steven Spielberg
123- “I even get inspired by movies that aren’t very good, because there’s always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There’s good in everything, I find.” – Steven Spielberg
125- “I turned down ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Spider-Man,’ two movies that I knew would be phenomenally successful, because I had already made movies like that before and they offered no challenge to me. I don’t need my ego to be reminded.” – Steven Spielberg
126- “When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn’t permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.” – Steven Spielberg
127- “I committed to directing ‘Catch Me If You Can’ not because of the divorce component, but principally because Frank Abagnale did things that were the most astonishing scams I had ever heard.” – Steven Spielberg
128- “My dad’s been responsible for a lot of my issues.” – Steven Spielberg
129- “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
130- “If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot not support the policies of his government.” – Steven Spielberg
131- “Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.” – Steven Spielberg
132- “I thought film was more important than life itself for many years. But I was naive to the world until my first child was born in 1985.” – Steven Spielberg
133- “Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director’s point of view.” – Steven Spielberg
134- “There were so many odd, strange things about Abraham Lincoln that I think nobody knew how to pigeonhole him.” – Steven Spielberg
135- “I had to get over my fear of running through the world naked and learn to say ‘take me or leave me.’” – Steven Spielberg
136- “She wanted to go over and hug his tears away, but she was too frightened.” – Steven Spielberg
137- “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
138- “My head’s not in the clouds, but I think I’ve gotten too much credit for being an astute businessman.” – Steven Spielberg
139- “I’m not really interested in making money. That’s always come as the result of success, but it’s not been my goal.” – Steven Spielberg
140- “Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that’s what I think keeps me hungry.” – Steven Spielberg
141- “There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.” – Steven Spielberg
142- “I’d love to build a company that will continue to make movies well beyond me someday. And I’d like to help start something great, even investing in it myself.” – Steven Spielberg
143- “The older I get, the more I look at movies as a moving miracle.” – Steven Spielberg
144- “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
145- “Wherever you are, I will find you and I will bring you home.” – Steven Spielberg
146- “Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?” – Steven Spielberg
147- “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
148- “I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.” – Steven Spielberg
149- “The world would be a poorer place without Doctor Who.” – Steven Spielberg
150- “I like that the best about DVD: how small it is.” – Steven Spielberg
151- “I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don’t think that’s the right way of making a decision about whether you’re going to back a film or not.” – Steven Spielberg
152- “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
153- “All through my career I’ve done what I can to discover new talent and give them a start.” – Steven Spielberg
154- “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
154- “When I don’t have a story to tell, I’m a terror to live with.” – Steven Spielberg
155- “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
156- “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
157- “One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.” – Steven Spielberg
158- “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
159- “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
160- “I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there’s film going through the camera.” – Steven Spielberg
161- “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
162- “People can relate to horses. Horses, I think, are basically in our genetic history. Horses were part of our culture, part of our collective society, for hundreds of years, and so, the horse is one of the most familiar animals to people of any race or culture or country.” – Steven Spielberg
163- “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
164- “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
165- “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
166- “Whatever affect any of my films have on audiences, I just kind of stop at the door. I make them and I just don’t go outside after they’re over.” – Steven Spielberg
167- “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
168- “I think one of the worst things that happened to me was, you know, my voluntary fallout with my father. And then the greatest thing that happened to me was when I saw the light, and realized I needed to love him in a way that he could love me back.” – Steven Spielberg
169- “If the world ran the way a crew runs a set, we’d have a better, more progressive world.” – Steven Spielberg
170- “This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we’re not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally.” – Steven Spielberg
171- “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
172- “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
173- “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
174- “Oh, torture. Torture. My pubic hairs went gray.” – Steven Spielberg
175- “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
