George Lucas Quotations | Page 2

No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.

Train yourself to let go of the things you fear to lose.

Part of the reason my friends and I became successful is that we were always helping each other.

The script is what you`ve dreamed up-this is what it should be. The film is what you end up with.

As a group, we are stronger than we are as individuals. We start to think we want everything for ourselves and we don't want to help anybody else. We want to succeed, but we don't want anybody else to succeed, because we want to be the winner.

It's okay to lose; just don't lose the lesson.

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.

Any society begins by realizing that together, by helping each other, you can survive better than if you fight each other and compete with each other.

When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not so much about who has access to what technology as about who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?

We were always dreaming of how it was going to be.

But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

There is no why. We are. Life is beyond reason.

Heroes come in all sizes, and you don't have to be a giant hero. You can be a very small hero. It's just as important to understand that accepting self-responsibi lity for the things you do, having good manners, caring about other people-these are heroic acts. Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives.

If I'd have gone to art school, or stayed in anthropology, I probably would have ended up back in film ... Mostly I just followed my inner feelings and passions ... and kept going to where it got warmer and warmer, until it finally got hot ... Everybody has talent. It's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is.

Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.

Someday you're going to have to learn to separate what seems to be important from what really is important.

If you want to be successful in a particular field or endeavor, I think perseverance is one of the key qualities. It's very important that you find something that you care about, that you have a deep passion for, because you're going to have to devote a lot of your life to it.

Star Wars has always struck a chord with people. There are issues of loyalty, of friendship, of good and evil... The theme came from stories and ideas that have been around for thousands of years.

The first movies, they just put up a camera and had a train come into a train station, and everybody was amazed. That was sort of all technology.

I am dedicating the majority of my wealth to improving education. It is the key to the survival of the human race. We have to plan for our collective future -- and the first step begins with the social, emotional, and intellectual tools we provide to our children. As humans, our greatest tool for survival is our ability to think and to adapt - as educators, storytellers, and communicators our responsibility is to continue to do so.

All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea ...

You want people to think. You want people to be emotionally moved. And there's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It has been around for thousands of years. And that's where something like live theater or a live performance is something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your audience and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work.

All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.

The easiest job you'll ever get is to try to make your first film. That's the easy one to get, is the first film because nobody knows whether you can make a film or not.

I think one of the reasons that Steven (Spielberg) and I have been as successful as we have is because we like the movies. We like to go to the movies. We enjoy movies and we want to make movies like the ones we enjoy.

I want to live where I want to live, and I will make films because I love to make films.

You're not going to stay in business, the business of making movies very long because you need the resources in order to keep going. So you have to try and find a niche audience or some kind of audience that has the same likes, dislikes and aesthetic sensibilities that you have.

So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be ?replaced? by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.

If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people.

Education is the single most important job of the human race.

My first six years in the business were hopeless. There are a lot of times when you sit and you say "Why am I doing this? I'll never make it. It's just not going to happen. I should go out and get a real job, and try to survive."

If I had time and a hammer, I'd track down every bootleg copy and smash it.

There are a lot of movies that are badly made that I love, and there are a lot of movies that are just beautifully made but I don't like them. And critics have a tendency - that's all they focus on, which is, "I like it. I don't like it. It's good. It's bad."

A movie is never finished, only abandoned.

You need peers; you need people who are at the same level you are. You never know in life when you're going to need help, and you never know who you're going to need it from.

Follow your bliss. Do the thing where you sit down at 8 a.m. and then you realize you're hungry and you look up and it's 10 p.m. If you can find something you love that much, it doesn't matter what you do.

I've discovered that most critics themselves are cinematically illiterate. They don't really know much about movies. They don't know the history. They don't know the technology. They don't know anything. So for them to try to analyze it, they're lost.

It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will...

You have to have a thick enough skin to cope with the criticism. I'm very self-critical and I have a lot of friends that I trust who are film directors and writers and people in my profession.

I have a strong feeling about interesting people in space exploration. . . . And the only way it's going to happen is to have some kid fantasize about getting his ray gun, jumping into his spaceship, and flying into outer space.

I wanted to make abstract films that are emotional, and I still do.

I'm lucky enough that there is never a blank canvas in front of me... I have hundreds of projects that I want to do but I am running out of time.

The older you get, the less seriously you take criticism. I've gotten to a point now where I ignore it completely. It's just not relevant to me anymore.

From kindergarten to college, certain teachers engaged my curiosity and motivated me to learn. While I was not the best student, their efforts left a lasting impact.

You really have to focus on what you're doing and just plow ahead no matter what hurdles are thrown in front of you.

My life is making movies. I like storytelling, and I've got a lot of stories that are stored up in my head that I hope to get out before my time is up.

Over time I began to realize that the level of cinema criticism in the last part of XX century in the United States was pretty low. The institution itself is not what it's supposed to be, and I realized that I didn't need to take that seriously.

I wanted to make a kids' film that would strengthen contemporary mythology.

I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them.

The object is to try to get the (movie) system to work for you, instead of against you. And the only way you can do it is through success, I'm afraid.

Today it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga.

On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’

STAR WARS is really three trilogies, nine films. The first trilogy covers the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, the middle trilogy the fall of the Empire, and the last trilogy involves the rebuilding of the Republic. It won't be finished for probably another 20 years.

People look at technology as sometimes an end to things, and it isn't an end in certain cases. In the movie business, the act of creating in the art form of movies, the craft of movies is completely technical, and that's all it is.

I felt that one of the major issues in the third film is that Luke is finally on his own and has to fight Vader and the Emperor by himself. If you get a sense that Yoda or Ben is there to help him or to somehow influence him, it diminishes the power of the scene.

One of the things that will never get explained in the films is how Ben was able to retain his identity, because it happened somewhere between the third and fourth movies. I set up that this is a discipline that he learned from Yoda; Yoda told him how to do that.

You need to have a lot of close family around you, a lot of friends to keep you honest. Take your time, take a year and just slow everything down a little bit. Get away from the success part, stay with yourself. Go off on a beach somewhere or do something to keep yourself aligned right.

When Star Wars became a hit and I had a chance to make the other movies, I had to figure out a way to bring Ben back, but a lot of the issues he had to deal with were carried by Yoda. In a sense, I combined Yoda with the spirit of Ben. I wanted Ben to have some kind of influence, but I didn't want it to be a direct influence where he could help Luke. So Ben has managed to keep his identity after he became one with the Force. One of the things he was doing on Tatooine besides watching over Luke was learning how to keep his identity after he became part of the Force.

Each time I do a trilogy it's ten years out of my life. I'll finish Episode III and I'll be 60. And the next 20 years after that I want to spend doing something other than Star Wars. If at 80 I'm still lively and having a good time and think I can work for another 10 years between 80 and 90, I might consider it. But don't count on it. There's nothing written, and it's not like I'm completing something. I'd have to start from scratch. The idea of a third trilogy was more of a media thing than it was me.

I thought it was too wacky for the general public. On his original opinion of his movie's chances for success, 1997.

Success is a very difficult thing. It's much more difficult than one might think.

I never had a story for the sequels, for the last trilogy. That's not really part of the plan at this point, and I'll be at the age where to do another trilogy would take 10 years. I'd always envisioned it as six movies. When you see it in six parts you'll understand that it really ends at part six.

I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.

We are all living in cages with the door wide open.

My success wasn't based on how I could push down everybody that was around me. My success was based on how much I could push everybody up.

From the outset, I conceived Star Wars as a series of six films, or two trilogies.

Attention should be paid to this question of our soul, and not simply to accounting procedures. Attention should be paid to the interest of those who are yet unborn, who should be able to see this generation as it saw itself, and the past generation as it saw itself.

It wasn't long after I began writing Star Wars that I realized the story was more than a single film could hold. As the saga of the Skywalkers and Jedi Knights unfolded, I began to see it as a tale that could take at least nine films to tell - three trilogies - and I realized, in making my way through the back story and after story, that I was really setting out to make the middle story.

One of the basic motifs in fairy tales is that you find the poor and unfortunate along the side of the road, and when they beg for help, if you give it to them, you end up succeeding. If you don't give it to them, you end up being turned into a frog or something. It's something that's been around for thousands of years, a concept that's been around for thousands of years.

Star Wars is a saga of Good vs. Evil, divided into nine parts.

For the third trilogy, I don't know if I will still be alive when it comes the time to make them.

The first Star Wars movie was one of six original stories I had written in the form of two trilogies. After the success of Star Wars, I added another trilogy. So now there are nine stories. The original two trilogies were concieved of as six films of which the first film was number four.

If you can tune into the fantasy life of an 11-year-old girl, you can make a fortune in this business.

You can be as rich, and famous, and powerful as you want to be, and it will not bring you happiness. That's said over and over and over, again. It's such a cliché that it hardly needs to be said, but people don't understand that it's actually true.

I think that Lethal Weapon-style dialogue is overused, it's a necessary aspect of high action films where you have to have the smart retort. You have to say "I'll be back baby" and stuff. It's not my style.

He took me from not being able to write a word in terms of writing screenplays to being the king of wooden dialogue.

I'm aware that dialogue isn't my strength. I use it as a device. I don't particularly like dialogue which is part of the problem.

I'd be the first person to say I can't write dialogue. My dialogue is very utilitarian and is designed to move things forward. I'm not Shakespeare. It's not designed to be poetic.

I intend more of a kinship with silent films than more modern film. I like the old cinema. My films are more of a hybrid - a different style of filmmaking to what I call talking head movies. Some people don't get it. Especially the more academic types.

Our system of education is locked in a time capsule. You want to say to the people in charge, 'You're not using today's tools! Wake up!'

I like racing. I love the speed and I'm a very kinetic person in terms of filmmaking. I love the movement of film more than anything else.

These Are Not The Droids You Are Looking For.

You have the most important job of anyone today. Our kids need you to advocate for their futures.

May the Force be with you.

Luke: Boy, it's lucky you have these compartments. Han: I use them for smuggling. I never thought I'd be smuggling myself in them. This is ridiculous.

Han Solo: Wonderful girl. Either I'm going to kill her or I'm beginning to like her.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Sometimes you must let go of your pride and do what is asked of us. Anakin Skywalker, Episode 2: Attack of the Clones

When you get a small group of fans who hate something, it becomes compounded by the internet. The press picks up the internet like it's a source. They don't realise it is just one person typing out their opinion.

Impressive, most impressive. (Darth Vadar)

Never tell me the odds!

I've always tried to be aware of what I say in my films, because all of us who make motion pictures are teachers - teachers with very loud voices.

Because we [people] have an intellect, part of what we do is try to understand the "intelligent design." Everything we don't know is "intelligent design." Everything we do know is science.

I think that God gave us a brain, and that it's the only thing we have to survive. All life forms have some advantage, some trick, some claw, some camouflage, some poison, some speed, something to help them survive. We've got a brain. Therefore it's our duty to use our brain.

Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

You may make something you don't think is very important during your lifetime and it'll last for a thousand years.