1- “Climate change is critical to me because I’m a parent; I feel a sense of responsibility to the future. I’m not going to be around to see its worst effects, which are going to be hitting in the 2030s, ’40s, ’50s, but my kids will.” -James Cameron
2- “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.” -James Cameron
3- “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.” -James Cameron
4- “Broken Horses is an artistic triumph. Beautifully written, acted and imaged, this film wraps slowly around you like a king snake and squeezes.” -James Cameron
5- “I think people had somehow gotten the sense that we have explored everything, when that isn’t the case. We so know so little about the ocean, and so much of it is being destroyed.” -James Cameron
6- “Usually, when you go to a movie, your consciousness floats above the film. 3D sucks you in and makes it a visceral experience.” -James Cameron
7- “Go home, pick up your video camera, and make a film.” -James Cameron
8- “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
9- “I’m King Of The World!” -James Cameron
10- “I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.” -James Cameron
11- “You don’t rest well as long as you’re seeking vengeance. I feel sad justice wasn’t done, but it’s time to move on and sleep well.” -James Cameron
12- “It’s about human imagination and curiosity. What’s out there? What’s in the great beyond? What exists at levels we can’t see with our five senses?” -James Cameron
13- “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
14- “The nation that leads in renewable energy will be the nation that leads the world 10, 20 years from now.” -James Cameron
15- “The film industry is about saying ‘no’ to people, and inherently you cannot take ‘no’ for an answer.” -James Cameron
16- “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.” -James Cameron
17- “There is a hugely underserved population out there… those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.” -James Cameron
18- “You can’t really call yourself an environmentalist if you’re still consuming animals. You just can’t.” -James Cameron
19- “Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.” -James Cameron
20- “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.” -James Cameron
21- “God wears white flannels.” -James Cameron
22- “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
23- “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
24- “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
25- “I’ve tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don’t like it when people are deferential to me because I’m an established filmmaker. It’s a blue-collar sensibility.” -James Cameron
26- “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
27- “Hate is a disease, and in 1930 I became sick with hatred.” -James Cameron
28- “We have a great responsibility. Whatever we make will become the truth, the visual reality that a generation will accept.” -James Cameron
29- “It’s really the sense of isolation, more than anything, realizing how tiny you are down in this big vast black unknown and unexplored place.” -James Cameron
30- “Don’t get seduced by your own stuff; work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind each time you watch your film.” -James Cameron
31- “I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt. It saves so much time.” -James Cameron
32- “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
33- “What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?” -James Cameron
34- “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.” -James Cameron
35- “When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long.” -James Cameron
36- “I don’t just want to be associated with a few good 3D movies and the audience is saying all of the other ones are crap.” -James Cameron
37- “I dreamed I was a soldier who could bring peace. Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up.” -James Cameron
38- “You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything.” -James Cameron
39- “There is a vast frontier that’s going to take us a while to understand… it was very lunar, a very desolate place, isolated.” -James Cameron
40- “It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth.” -James Cameron
41- “There seems to be a lot of excitement around something that, to me, is a yawn, frankly.” -James Cameron
42- “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.” -James Cameron
43- “The magic doesn’t come from within the director’s mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.” -James Cameron
44- “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.” -James Cameron
45- “When you have the feeling that anything’s possible, sometimes you wind up acting on it.” -James Cameron
46- “Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.” -James Cameron
47- “If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.” -James Cameron
48- “Failure is an option, fear is not.” -James Cameron
49- “What are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. It’s the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world.” -James Cameron
50- “I guess Titanic because it made the most money. No, I`m kidding. I don`t really have a favorite. Maybe Terminator because that was the film that was the first one back when I was essentially a truck driver.” -James Cameron
51- “I mean, you have to be able – you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can’t do it by yourself.” -James Cameron
52- “The quickest way to destroy ocean science is to take human explorers out of the water.” -James Cameron
53- “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
54- “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.” -James Cameron
55- “Here’s my philosophy in life: If there’s a fire, you put it out. If there’s a flood, you fill sandbags and you build a dike. You roll up your sleeves and you get to work.” -James Cameron
56- “With ‘Avatar,’ I thought, Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys’ adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars – a soldier goes to Mars.” -James Cameron
57- “All my films are love stories.” -James Cameron
58- “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
59- “Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move.” -James Cameron
60- “If it was up to the studio, everything would be shot with a camcorder.” -James Cameron
61- “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.” -James Cameron
62- “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
63- “Your imagination can create a reality.” -James Cameron
64- “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.” -James Cameron
65- “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
66- “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.” -James Cameron
67- “Your only competitors are your past achievements.” -James Cameron
68- “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.” -James Cameron
69- “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” -James Cameron
70- “That worst evil of long dictatorships: the loss of all political experience.” -James Cameron
71- “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
72- “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.” -James Cameron
73- “Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.” -James Cameron
74- “My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.” -James Cameron
75- “Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.” -James Cameron
76- “I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.” -James Cameron
77- “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
78- “I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.” -James Cameron
79- “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
80- “I’m certainly not a fan of conversion when you could shoot the movie in 3-D.” -James Cameron
81- “The films that influenced me were so disparate that there’s almost no pattern.” -James Cameron
82- “I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff “pieces”, when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.” -James Cameron
83- “Targets and timetables do matter. But there is a dispirited feeling that the U.S. just rejects multilateral target-setting for the time being.” -James Cameron
84- “This is a vast frontier that’s going to take us awhile to understand. It was very lunar, desolated, isolated.” -James Cameron
85- “Nature’s not our enemy, it’s our sustenance; and we need it – and we need nature healthy for us to be healthy and to survive long term.” -James Cameron
86- “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
87- “The last I checked, ‘Titanic’ worldwide has grossed $1.3 billion. Imagine how much more it would have grossed if I had gotten the sky correct.” -James Cameron
88- “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
89- “I probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that’s gone before that it’s sort of like a fractal. It’s gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you’re a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations.” -James Cameron
90- “I love it when I have a nightmare to me that means I got my money’s worth out of that eight hours.” -James Cameron
91- “I don’t look at scripts. I just write them.” -James Cameron
92- “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.” -James Cameron
93- “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
94- “I pick my feature film battles very carefully. They’re going to be personal and they’re going to take a lot of my energy. I’m not going to be some big production company and be Jerry Bruckheimer or something like that. It doesn’t interest me.” -James Cameron
95- “I am king of the world!” -James Cameron
96- “Everybody’s going to do the 3D slightly differently the same way that people are going to deal with color differently. Some movies downplay the color, some color is very vibrant. Color design is very different. We’ve got to think of 3D like color or like sound, as just part of the creative palette that we paint with and not some whole new thing that completely redefines the medium.” -James Cameron
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