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.‘

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

I worked with Steven Spielberg on Amistad… he seemed so very secure in himself that he let me do things.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer’s disease where they slowly began to recover other people’s lost memories.

Movies were invented for Jimmy Cagney, and he was invented for the movies. A perfect match.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

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

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

I wanted to write.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

When I die, I’m gonna leave my body to science fiction.

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.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

I read ‚The High Frontier‘ in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I never look at my watch when I’m sketching!

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it’s very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.