James Cameron quotes: the multimillionaire filmmaker’s best quotes ever recorded.
“The secret to success is preparing yourself mentally for when opportunity strikes.”
“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.”
“The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.”
“When you have the feeling that anything’s possible, sometimes you wind up acting on it.”
“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”
“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.”
“Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own.”
“Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.”
“Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.”
“Sometimes the more fantastic an idea is, the more you have to be very careful about how you design it.”
“Your only competitors are your past achievements.”
“To help yourself, you must be yourself. Be the best that you can be. When you make a mistake, learn from it, pick yourself up, and move on.”
“You have to not listen to the naysayers because there will be many and often they’ll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move.”
“You’ve got to be merciless on yourself, and don’t get seduced by your own stuff. Don’t get high on your own supply. Work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind.”
“But on the other hand, when you get it right you’ve got to know it, and you’ve got to defend it.”
“We have a great responsibility. Whatever we make will become the truth – the visual reality that a generation will accept.”
“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.”
“I always wanted to be a raconteur, a storyteller, and I also wanted to create visually and produce images. I was always doing both: I’d be writing stories and also painting, looking for a way to mesh them.”
“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.”
“I imagined myself being a filmmaker, but never a director, if that makes any sense at all.”
“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.”
“I hope there’s some kid out there dreaming of worlds we can’t even imagine.”
“If you wait until the right time to have a child you’ll die childless, and I think filmmaking is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it’s bad.”
“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.”
“You should give your kids more than your presence – you should give them your example.”
“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 do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.”
“I love it when I have a nightmare. To me that means I got my money’s worth out of that eight hours.”
