George Lucas Quotations | Page 3

They were at the wrong place at the wrong time naturally they became heroes

[In ancient Rome,] why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and give the government to his nephew? Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? It's the same thing with Germany and Hitler.

Oh, my. I'd forgotten how much I hate space travel.

I grew up in the era, 'Don't trust anybody over 30.' And, you know, I still feel that. Don't trust me.

Ultimately the Force is the larger mystery of the universe. And to trust your feelings is your way into that.

Teachers are the most important individuals in our society - nothing is as powerful as the human touch in education.

If you want to be successful in a particular field of endeavor, I think perseverance is one of the key qualities.

I thought it [Star Wars] was too wacky for the general public. Right or wrong this is my movie, this is my decision, and this is my creative vision, and if people don't like it, they don't have to see it.

George Orwell was right. There's no greater genius as far as I'm concerned in terms of understanding human nature. I think that a lot of people just believe anything you tell them, and no matter what it is, they just go along with the program. They're perfectly happy to take their pill every day and do what they're told, and work and buy things, and work and buy things, and stay out of any complex emotional situations. And whatever the authorities tell them to do, they do, and whatever the authorities say is the truth, they believe is the truth.

Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood.

I'm not in a contest. I make movies. I'm not a racehorse...

In the end the most important thing to me is that I've raised three kids. I know that'll be the most important accomplishment of my life and it is the most easily obtainable, because all you have to do is pay attention. It is hard work and most people don't realize that's the real gift they are getting in terms of goals and success and accomplishments.

Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded: get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.

[Star Wars is] designed primarily to make young people think about the mystery. Not to say, 'Here's the answer.' It's to say, 'Think about this for a second. Is there a God? What does God look like? What does God sound like? What does God feel like? How do we relate to God?'

Young people don't have a fantasy life anymore, not the way we did. All they've got is Kojak and Dirty Harry. There's all these kids running around wanting to be killer cops.

I think that's an obligation you have, to give back no matter what happens. It actually ends up being easier when you're young than when you become successful. Suddenly you realize you've gone into a whole other realm of philanthropy, from just being a volunteer to being this person that dedicates buildings and saves lots of children in some faraway place.

I must admit I suffered a bit when I first came to England. But then I realised that there was nothing to be intimidated by, everybody had two legs.

Everybody has talent and it's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is. A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in - something that you can start at 9 o'clock, look up from your work and it's 10 o'clock at night - and also something that you have a talent, not a talent for, but skills that you have a natural ability to do very well. And usually those two things go together.

You must let go of your past and embrace your future and figure out what path you're going to go down

After a lot of struggling and sort of reflection I realized that the time you have to give is now, regardless of how old you are.

That's the issue that I've been exploring: How did the Republic turn into the Empire? That's paralleled with: How did Anakin turn into Darth Vader? How does a good person go bad, and how does a democracy become a dictatorship? It isn't that the Empire conquered the Republic, it's that the Empire is the Republic.

Good luck has its storms.

The theme that runs through my movies is the fact that we create barriers for ourselves....because we say, Well, I can't do that. But in the end, you can't do it unless you can imagine yourself succeeding at it.

I think as you grow up, you realize you have obligations just in your life - being a citizen, being part of humanity - to help other people, to help your country, to help the world.

I like to say that films are never finished, they're only abandoned.

The underlying issues, the psychological motives, in all my movies have been the same, he said. Personal responsibility and friendship, the importance of a compassionate life as opposed to a passionate life.

Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

I have a supermarket full of ideas and the challenge is how many ideas can I get in my cart before I'm gone. When you're doing it, you're not focused on success. It's not a matter of modesty. You're simply trying to get all the things done that you want to get done in your life.

All the religions are true, they just see a different part of the elephant.

You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks.

As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this close. So it's just one of those recurring things... I hope this doesn't come true in our country. Maybe the film will waken people to the situation.

As the workplace becomes more specialized, from offices to medical centers to factories, teams of people must accomplish their work by collaborating with each other. In my work in filmmaking, we need talented individuals with technical skills, but their abilities to communicate and work with others are just as valuable.

I have a lot of ideas and I want to be able to work. To me, it's like one of these contests where you get five minutes in a supermarket to take anything off the shelves you want and try to fill your cart up as much as you can. That's the way I look at my work.

You can find people who have discovered the fact that it's really helping people, it's really being compassionate toward other human beings that makes you happy, that gives you a spiritual fulfillment - a kind of fulfillment that goes way beyond anything you can buy.

In my films, all the great things are put together. It's not like one kind of ice cream but rather a very big Sundae.

I think there are going to be some social changes that take place due to the Internet, and the availability of the tools to more and more people. I think you are going to find a lot of people re-cutting movies and changing them, making them into their own movies.

It's very important not to do what your peers think you should do, not do what your parents think,your teachers or even your culture. Do what's inside of you.

No film ever ends up exactly as you would like it to, but with minor exceptions, THX came out pretty much as I had visualized it, thanks to some excellent assistance -- and a whole lot of luck.

In my experience, there's no such thing as luck.

I think crossing into the digital age is the big move for the industry. I think it will be the biggest thing that's happened while I've been making movies. I equate it to the invention of color or sound, and I don't see any other major technical process coming along and changing that.

We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn't get it done in time. We couldn't get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn't as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.

I'm extremely grateful that I discovered my passion. I love movies. I love to watch them, I love to make them.

Kurosawa was one of film's true greats... His ability to transform a vision into a powerful work of art is unparalleled. So it seemed appropriate to name the new digital studio for him.

A lot of great thinkers- like Einstein and Newton- come up with their best ideas when they're young because they don't yet think in the way that the establishment teaches them. Sometimes your lack of knowledge frees your mind to be creative and think in a different way. But you still have to be logical and figure out a practical way to get things done, even though you're looking at things differently.

I put all of my resources into pushing the evolution in an industry that is notoriously backwards and I enjoy pushing that envelope,.

I wanted Yoda to be the traditional kind of character you find in fairy tales and mythology. And that character is usually a frog or a wizened old man on the side of the road. The hero is going down the road and meets this poor and insignificant person. The goal or lesson is for the hero to learn to respect everybody and to pay attention to the poorest person because that's where the key to his success will be.

You don't see the struggle part of a person's life. You only see the success they have.

All art is dependent on technology because it's a human endeavour , so even when you're using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that's technology .

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling.

Don't avoid the cliches - they are cliches because they work!

If this were a fantasy world, there would be ten of me and we would each be doing what we wanted to do.

There wasn't much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult.

The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it.

Sound is 50 percent of the movie going experience, and I've always believed audiences are moved and excited by what they hear in my movies at least as much as by what they see.

The sciences are the 'how,' and the humanities are the 'why' - why are we here, why do we believe in the things we believe in. I don't think you can have the 'how' without the 'why.'

I am more of a visual person than a verbal person. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.

I regret not the things I have done, only those I have yet to do.

Suddenly everything came together in one place. All my likes, everything I actually seemed to have talent for was right there. I said, "Hey, this is it. I can do this really well. I really love to do it."

I made lots of movies while in school while everybody else was running around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish they'd give me some film."

One of the most telling things about film school is you've got a lot of students wandering around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a move."

I wanted to be a car mechanic and I wanted to race cars and the idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn't really a priority. But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school. I got great grades. Eventually I got very excited about anthropology and about social sciences and psychology, and I was able to push my photography even further and eventually discovered film and film schools.

I'm here, and every day now is an extra day. I've been given an extra day so I've got to make the most of it.

On the professional side, I've helped move cinema from a chemical-based medium to a digital-based medium. That'll be one of the landmarks. And I've left these stories, these little tales that have been imprinted on the media, which will or will not be of interest to people in the future. I've done the best I can.

I was a terrible student in high school and the thing that the auto accident did - and it happened just as I graduated, so I was at this sort of crossroads - but it made me apply myself more, because I realized more than anything else what a thin thread we hang on in life, and I really wanted to make something out of my life.

We seemed to be drifting as a society - losing touch with the basic concepts of right and wrong.

That had always been my purpose: to get people back in touch with what makes us so valuable as a human race.

The thing about science-fiction fans and "Star Wars" fans is they're very independent-thinking people. They all think outside the box, but they all have very strong ideas about what should happen, and they think it should be their way. Which is fine, except I'm making the movies, so I should have it my way.

I'm the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they're going to throw rocks at me, they're going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.

Most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work. They've got a new perspective on it, they've got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done.

Anybody that makes films knows the film is never finished. It's abandoned or it's ripped out of your hands, and it's thrown into the marketplace, never finished. It's a very rare experience where you find a filmmaker who says, "That's exactly what I wanted. I got everything I needed. I made it just perfect. I'm going to put it out there."

I haven't met anybody who hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever. And there's no way to sort of get around that.

It took me three, four years, to get from my first film to my second film, banging on doors, trying to get people to give me a chance. Writing, struggling, with no money in the bank, working as an editor on the side. Working as a cameraman on the side. Getting little jobs, eking out a living. Trying to stay alive, and pushing a script that nobody wanted.

I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.

After you've done the first feature, then you have heck of a difficult time getting your second film off the ground. They look at your first film and they say, "Oh well, we don't want you anymore."

You can't put a title card at the head of the movie and say, "Well, we really had a bad problem. You know, the actor got sick and it rained this day and we had a hurricane."

I've had much more down in my life than I've had up. And much more struggle. First of all, when I went into the film school everybody said, "What are you doing? This is a complete dead-end for a career."

There wasn't anything in my life that was going to stop me from making movies.

Whenever you're making a movie, especially when you're writing, you always have self-doubts.

You try to get yourself into a situation where you only have to answer to yourself, where you can ask advice of people and work with your peers and mentors and things to try to do the best job that you can possibly do.

There's nothing worse than the frustration of having somebody who you feel doesn't get what you're doing, trying to turn it into something else. It's a very, very annoying and sort of frustrating thing and I just never wanted to go through it. I was very fortunate as I came up through the film business that I was able to insulate myself from that.

Sometimes people are surprised to learn that most of the films I've made don't work. They've been released but nobody has ever seen them. Maybe 40 percent of them are very successful. That's a very high percentage; most people have maybe 10 or 15 percent of their films work.

When my films don't work it's usually because I tried some very experimental idea. I tried new ideas and they just didn't work, as opposed to trying to do something conventional and having it be so conventional nobody wanted to see it.

I'm very proud of all the movies I made. I am very happy with everything I've done. I like to watch my movies. Some of them work. Some of them don't. Some of them people like, most of them they don't.

Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer. I'm very interested in studying cultures and social issues, but as an academic I don't think I would have been too successful.

I like making movies. I like the process. I like trying out new ideas, and if they don't work, they don't work. That's the reason I generated the money in the first place, to be able to try things. That's where I spend my money.

It's not a matter of how well can you make a movie. It's how well can you make it under the circumstance, because there's always circumstances. You cannot use that as an excuse.

Human nature means battling constantly between being completely self-absorbed and trying to be a communal creature. Nature makes you a communal creature. The ultimate single-minded, self-centered creature is a cancer cell. And mostly, we're not made up of cancer cells.

You have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever. We're one of the very few creatures that has a choice, and can intellectualize the process.

I would like to see our society mature, and become more rational and more knowledge-based, less emotion-based.

I'd like to see education play a larger role in our daily lives, have people come to a larger understanding - a "bigger picture" understanding - of how we fit into the world, and how we fit into the universe. Not necessarily thinking of ourselves, but thinking of others.

A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in - something that you can start at 9 o'clock, look up from your work and it's 10 o'clock at night.

I was always extremely curious about why people did the things they do.

I've always just followed my own course, whatever I found the most interesting to me at the moment. I've never had a real plan of, "I want to get from here to there, and I've got to do this."

Obviously, people have a lot of different dreams of where America should be, and where it should fit into things. Obviously, very few of them are compatible, and very few of them are very compatible with the laws of nature.

When a movie comes out, I always go off on a beach so I miss all the craziness that goes on, all the hoopla, and the hype and the success, and how much it's making, or whether it's doing good or whether it's doing bad. I just miss it all. I don't talk to anybody, and a couple weeks later I come back and it's all over with.

I wanted to transfer to an art school, and ended up going to the University of Southern California. They had a cinematography school, and I said "Well, that's sort of like photography, maybe that will be interesting." And once I started in that department, I found what it was that I loved and was good at.

Real love is on the inside. It's somebody you have a common ground with, you share the same values, you share the same interests, you share the same humor, you share all those things that are things that will last you the rest of your life.

If I make a movie that has a whole bunch of music in it, I get to listen to the music all day long, and I don't have to say, 'Well, I gotta go back to work and I gotta stop listening to the music.' I get to listen to music and go to work.

Time is more important to me than money.