James Cameron Quotes

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 doesn't do what James Cameron does for James Cameron.

James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is... James Cameron.

I set my goals way higher than the achievable.

And when I fail, I fail at a very high level. That's my process. It's really demented, but it actually works. When you are aiming really high and doing something new, you must be also prepared to fail, learn from your mistakes and begin with a new plan. More motivated than before.

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.

I want to challenge all of you as people of deep conscience, people who are environment stewards of the earth and oceans ... By changing what you eat, you will change the entire contract between the human species and the natural world.

But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration - because it's a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks.

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

I lived in a small town. It was 2,000 people in Canada. A little river that went through it and we swam in the - you know, there was a lot of water around. Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away.

Targets and timetables do matter. But there is a dispirited feeling that the U.S. just rejects multilateral target-setting for the time being.

Old Rose: It's been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint.

The china had never been used. The sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.

Getting the audience to cry for the Terminator at the end of T2, for me that was the whole purpose of making that film. If you can get the audience to feel emotion for a character that in the previous film you despised utterly and were terrified by, then that's a cinematic arc.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff; work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind each time you watch your film.

We have nightmares because our brain is running simulations to put us in jeopardy to see what we'll do or to acclimatize us to that idea that something bad could happen. It's just how human beings are wired because the entire time we were evolving we had to jump quick or the leopard would get us or whatever it was. It's Darwinian.

You can't be an environmentalist, you can't be an ocean steward without truly walking the walk and you can't walk the walk in the world of the future, the world ahead of us, the world of our children, not eating a plant-based diet.

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.

You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they`ll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.

I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.

Action is a way of externalizing an emotional state.

You might not be running, leaping, climbing and doing all that. But, the way you create that emotional state in a movie is by having the characters have physical jeopardy that they have to work against.

When the ship docks, I'm getting off with you.

This is crazy. I know it doesn't make any sense, that's why I trust it.

It's important for me to have hope because that's my job as a parent, to have hope, for my kids, that we're not going to leave them in a world that's in shambles, that's a chaotic place, that's a dangerous place.

It’s not a requirement to eat animals, we just choose to do it, so it becomes a moral choice and one that is having a huge impact on the planet, using up resources and destroying the biosphere.

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.

It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth.

In writing the new films, I’ve come to realize that AVATAR’s world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.

I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.

Every time my cameras go out on a movie, we learn something new and then we take what we learn and we put it into the next generation of the cameras so we're constantly improving. It's kind of like building a race car, racing it, then running back to the shop and working on the engine some more and tinkering with it to improve it.

Rose: You're crazy. Jack: That's what everybody says but, with all due respect, Miss, I'm not the one hanging off the back of a ship here. Come on. C'mon, give me your hand. You don't want to do this.

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling.

It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.

We have a great responsibility. Whatever we make will become the truth, the visual reality that a generation will accept.

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.

Rose: But now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me... in every way that a person can be saved

Jack: Where to, Miss? Rose: To the stars.

Jack: Rose! You're so stupid. Why did you do that, huh? You're so stupid, Rose. Why did you do that? Why? Rose: You jump, I jump, right? Jack: Right. Rose: Oh God! I couldn't go. I couldn't go, Jack. Jack: It's all right. We'll think of something. Rose: At least I'm with you.

I don't look at scripts. I just write them.

Rose: You have a gift Jack, you do. You see people. Jack: I see you. Rose: And? Jack: You wouldn't have jumped.

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.

The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer.

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.

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.

If you faced a long hungry period with nothing between you and starvation but a bit of barley and a pig, you'd be better off turning the barley into beer and letting the pig starve.

If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.

Religions fulfill deep-seated psychological needs for people, and if you don't get it from a specific religious doctrine, you'll get it from the kind of films I like to make. A film like The Terminator is consciously meant to give a sense of empowerment to the individual.

You can't really call yourself an environmentalist if you're still consuming animals. You just can't.

I don’t feel that I’m making movies for iPhones. If someone wants to watch it on an iPhone, I’m not going to stop them, especially if they’re paying for it, but I don’t recommend it. I think it’s dumb, when you have characters that are so small in the frame that they’re not visible. I’m trying to make an epic.

The universe is like a giant bank vault lock, where the tumblers are constantly moving and once in a while the tumblers line up and you have to listen for the click. So you must be prepared in that moment to step through the door.

That worst evil of long dictatorships: the loss of all political experience.

Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.

The nation that leads in renewable energy will be the nation that leads the world 10, 20 years from now.

Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.