None of the films I’ve done was designed for a mass audience, except for ‚Indiana Jones.‘ Nobody in their right mind thought ‚American Graffiti‘ or ‚Star Wars‘ would work.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‚mature‘ critics often are.

Not bragging by any means, but I could have done a lot of other stuff as far as working in films go and working in television… I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn’t mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they’re happy if they do get it.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

We don’t want people to leave the stadium until the game finishes.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

The thing that’s made me open my eyes to what was happening to the environment and climate was films and documentaries.

Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.

I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That’s still what I am doing. The end.

I knew by heart all the dialogue of James Dean’s films; I could watch Rebel Without a Cause a hundred times over.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

The movie business is a big gamble.

Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I’d become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

I didn’t have to win, and winning wasn’t important to me. Being world champion wasn’t important to me. What was important to me was entertaining the audience, and whether that meant winning, losing, singing, or whatever it was on the live show we were doing every week, which was awesome, I was game for it.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

I’ve seen too many ups and downs in the movie industry.

When the kids are laughing in the audience, I tear up, I’m so happy I did a nice thing.

I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.

Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

I’ve done films where we don’t rehearse, and I’ve done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

I played with two lines of action figures when I was a kid: G.I. Joe and Star Wars.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

‚Star Wars‘ is fun, its exciting, its inspirational, and people respond to that. It’s what they want.

My wish is to bring my heroes to the big screen, and many of them have already appeared in my films.

Yes, I’m always – I’m always surprised when you make a film and you live with it a while and you put it out, you never dream that anybody is ever going to want to really see it.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

It was the money from ‚Star Wars‘ and ‚Jaws‘ that allowed the theaters to build their multiplexes, which allowed an opening up of screens.

‚American Graffiti‘ was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time, and I was compromising myself to death.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

One thing about ‚Star Wars‘ that I’m really proud of is that it expands the imagination. That’s why I like the ‚Star Wars‘ toys.

I like to change characters and then, slowly I believe the audience treat me as, like an actor who can fight. It’s not like an action star.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don’t read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2’s audience.

I prefer the old theaters because the audience is… trapped.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

For ‚Star Wars‘ I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

I have a love interest in every one of my films: a gun.

I guess any movie actor can become a role model for audiences out there who enjoy him.

I spoke to a million in one service, in Korea, in Seoul. And that was the largest audience I ever have had.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.