When I grow up, I still want to be a director.

You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!

Cell phones tend to bring us more inside of our lives whereas movies offer a chance to escape, so there are two competing forces.

The love we do not show here on Earth is the only thing that hurts us in the after-life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whether in success or in failure, I'm proud of every single movie I've ever directed.

I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.

I quit college so fast I didn't even clean out my locker.

My father had many, many veterans over to the house, and the older I got the more I appreciated their sacrifice.

'E.T.' began with me trying to write a story about my parents' divorce.

When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.

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.

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.

I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday.

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.

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.

In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era.

The machinery of the democratic process is really no different today from what it was 150 years ago.

Everybody who works for Amblin Television has to do five jobs.

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.

I'm not really interested in making money.

The best time of my life has been the three instances where I have been there for the birth of my children. That is, nothing [else] has ever come close.

He never gave up. And he does that for us.

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.

Your job is to create a world that lasts forever.

Television has a different biorhythm than movies. I love the biorhythm of TV.

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.

My head's not in the clouds, but I think I've gotten too much credit for being an astute businessman.

Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.

The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.

When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.

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.

We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.

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.

The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time.

I feel I'm all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.

Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.

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.

I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.

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

The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.

Making a movie where the central character is a horse was a challenge. Because I'm scared of riding. I was thrown as a kid. 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.

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.

There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen.

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.

My dad took me to my first movie.