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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Gary Ross Quotes

I loved making ‘The Hunger Games’ – it was the happiest experience of my professional life. Lionsgate was supportive of me in a manner that few directors ever experience in a franchise: they empowered me to make the film I wanted to make and backed the movie in a way that requires no explanation beyond the remarkable results.

– Gary Ross

I mean, what is racism? Racism is a projection of our own fears onto another person. What is sexism? It’s our own vulnerability about our potency and masculinity projected as our need to subjugate another person, you know? Fascism, the same thing: People are trying to untidy our state, so I legislate as a way of controlling my environment.

– Gary Ross

‘Dr. Strangelove’ was and is one of my favorite movies ever, and I just can’t believe they actually blew up the world after that.

– Gary Ross

I don’t understand people who dream in black and white. I just don’t get it. My dreams have always been vivid color.

– Gary Ross

Why is every great children’s story about a journey? Maybe that’s because we are always on one.

– Gary Ross

If there’s a 13- or 14-year old kid who is yearning for something beyond the social forces in his own world, in his own neighborhood, the library is the only place where he can go to find that. It was exciting and thrilling to me all the time I worked in the library. It’s such a force for social good and it can do so much.

– Gary Ross

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, ‘The Tale of Desperaux’, and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

– Gary Ross

You can’t tell your kids to read if you’re just watching television. They have to see you read. And in that respect, I think it’s important to walk the walk. It’s a wonderful shared time.

– Gary Ross

I think the CG is an instrument to create reality. I don’t think it’s an instrument to create a heightened reality.

– Gary Ross

There’s something so wonderful about writing in rhyme where it isn’t just the meaning of the words, it’s the music to the words and the shape and the sound.

– Gary Ross

I mean, the wonderful thing about writing a book is that you’re getting a finished product at the end of the day. You’re communicating directly with the reader.

– Gary Ross

As time goes by the memories of sitting on the edge of a bed and reading aloud with your kid are going to be very meaningful in your own mental scrapbook.

– Gary Ross

Ultimately, so much Dr. Seuss is about empowerment. He invites us to disappear into our imagination and then blows the doors off what that can mean.

– Gary Ross

You have to listen to the movie while you’re making it. I think that’s important.

– Gary Ross

Family entertainment is really very necessary in our culture. Look how profitable they are. It’s almost not discretionary. You need to take your family to the movies.

– Gary Ross

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the ’50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.

– Gary Ross

People who want to be a star get their teeth capped. People who want to be an actor get to work.

– Gary Ross

I mean, in ‘Big’ and ‘Pleasantville,’ it’s a journey that the characters go on where I think they come to kind of meet themselves at the end and who they actually are and give full voice to who they actually are. And that, you know, obviously fascinates me for some reason. Maybe I didn’t adequately grow up.

– Gary Ross

I think movies do play a valuable role in turning people on to the act of reading. I think that phenomenon just creates readers. At first they’re going to love ‘Harry Potter,’ or they may love ‘The Hunger Games,’ but after that, they’re going to love the act of reading and wonder, ‘What else can I read?’

– Gary Ross

There are not many people on Team Gary. Actually, it’s two people. My kids.

– Gary Ross

There’s nothing I’d rather do than sort of, you know, sit at my computer and rhyme.

– Gary Ross

Most modern science fiction went to school on ‘Dune.’ Even ‘Harry Potter’ with its ‘boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny’ shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.

– Gary Ross

What works about fairy tales is that they endure, and the great thing about fairy tales is that you can explore big, epic things that you can’t really explore in other situations.

– Gary Ross

Despite recent speculation in the media, and after difficult but sincere consideration, I have decided not to direct ‘Catching Fire.’ As a writer and a director, I simply don’t have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make, because of the fixed and tight production schedule.

– Gary Ross

‘Harry Potter’ created a generation of readers in an era when kids could have disappeared into the depths of the Internet. That’s no small feat. Every book series owes J.K. Rowling a debt of gratitude.

– Gary Ross

It’s interesting – in ‘Fail Safe,’ as well, they didn’t back off. We were raised with kind of this spectrum of that Armageddon and lived under it, so those were probably the films. ‘Fail Safe’ sort of haunted me.

– Gary Ross