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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

James Cameron Quotes

I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.

– James Cameron

There are many talented people who haven’t fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.

– James Cameron

I blame it on Walt Disney, where animals are given human qualities. People don’t understand that a wild animal is not something that is nice to pat. It can seriously harm you.

– James Cameron

Nature’s imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.

– James Cameron

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.

– James Cameron

To convince people to back your idea, you’ve got to sell it to yourself and know when it’s the moment. Sometimes that means waiting. It’s like surfing. You don’t create energy, you just harvest energy already out there.

– James Cameron

Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don’t use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.

– James Cameron

I certainly didn’t think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football.

– James Cameron

Inspiration can hit you in the head at any time in any context. It could happen in a conversation. Talking to someone at a party, you can get an idea. But you’ve got to remember those inspirations.

– James Cameron

I’m a storyteller; that’s what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven’t been and returning to tell a story they haven’t heard before.

– James Cameron

I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.

– James Cameron

The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

– James Cameron

People call me a perfectionist, but I’m not. I’m a rightist. I do something until it’s right, and then I move on to the next thing.

– James Cameron

I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.

– James Cameron

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We’ll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

– James Cameron

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.

– James Cameron

It’ll be all of our efforts together. It won’t won’t ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it’s going to be the sum total of the group.

– James Cameron

Every time you dive, you hope you’ll see something new – some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn’t.

– James Cameron

I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. It’s very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy – a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they’re required to keep an agreement with you only if you’re successful or they need you.

– James Cameron

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.

– James Cameron

It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.

– James Cameron

I don’t use film cameras. I don’t do visual effects the same way. We don’t use miniature models; it’s all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It’s a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same.

– James Cameron

If you wait until the right time to have a child you’ll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it’s bad.

– James Cameron

What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?

– James Cameron

I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.

– James Cameron

I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father’s respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things.

– James Cameron