James Cameron Quotes are a masterpiece!
His brilliance is not only restricted to filmmaking but it also permeates the fabric of life.
He is one of the most innovative filmmakers of all time and gained his due recognition through his blockbusters like “The Terminator (1984), The Abyss(1989), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009).”
Below we have put down a list of the 101 most influential quotes by James Cameron. They will benefit you in navigating your life by inspiring and galvanizing you into taking action for your future.
Enjoy his quotes!
Table of Contents
James Cameron Quotes
James Cameron Quotes
Quotes by James Cameron
1- “Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own.”
2- “Failure is an option, but fear is not.”
3- “Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.”
4- “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.”
5- “Sometimes the more fantastic an idea is, the more you have to be very careful about how you design it.”
6- “The nation that leads in renewable energy will be the nation that leads the world.”
7- “I am king of the world!”
8- “A woman’s heart is an ocean of deep secrets.”
9- “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.”
10- “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”
James Cameron Quotes
11- “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.”
12- “I don’t look at scripts. I just write them.”
13- “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.”
14- “This is a vast frontier that’s going to take us awhile to understand. It was very lunar, desolated, isolated.”
15- “Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move.”
16- “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.”
17- “The film industry is about saying ‘no’ to people, and inherently you cannot take ‘no’ for an answer.”
18- “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.”
19- “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.”
20- “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.”
Quotes by James Cameron
21- “Jack: Where to, Miss? Rose: To the stars.”
22- “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.”
23- “The key to a sequel is to meet audience expectation and yet be surprising.”
24- “When i was lying in the V.A. hospital with a big hole blown through the middle of my life, i started having these dreams of flying. I was free. But sooner or later, you always have to wake up.”
25- “Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.”
26- “I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.”
27-“There seems to be a lot of excitement around something that, to me, is a yawn, frankly.”
28- “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.”
29- “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.”
30- “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 Quotes
31- “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.”
32- “When you have the feeling that anything’s possible, sometimes you wind up acting on it.”
33- “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.”
34- “The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there’s an alien world here on Earth.”
35- “NASA has this phrase that they like: ‘Failure is not an option.’ 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. So, that’s the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you’re doing, failure is an option, but fear is not.”
Quotes by James Cameron
36- “I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.”
37- “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.”
38- “All my films are love stories.”
39- “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.”
40- “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 doubt yourself.”
James Cameron Quotes
41- “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.”
42- “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.”
43- “I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.”
44- “I feed on other people’s creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I’ve wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.”
45- “You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything.”
46- “My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.”
47- “The future of 3D will be defined by TV.”
48- “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.”
49- “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.”
50- “Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.”
James Cameron Quotes
51- “The films that influenced me were so disparate that there’s almost no pattern.”
52- “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.”
53- “Building upon the world we created with ‘Avatar’ has been a rare and incredibly rewarding experience. 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.”
54- “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.”
55- “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.”
Quotes by James Cameron
56- “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.”
57- “What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?”
58- “So my message is in whichever realm, be it going into space or going into the deep sea, you have to balance the yin and yang of caution and boldness, risk aversion and risk taking, fear and fearlessness. No great accomplishment takes place, whether it be a movie or a deep ocean expedition, or a space mission, without a kind of dynamic equipoise between the two. Luck is not a factor. Hope is not a strategy. Fear is not an option.”
59- “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.”
60- “Your only competitors are your past achievements.”
James Cameron Quotes
61- “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.”
62- “There is a hugely underserved population out there… those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.”
63- “The magic doesn’t come from within the director’s mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.”
64- “I was petrified at the start of The Terminator (1984). First of all, I was working with a star, at least I thought of him as a star at the time. Arnold came out of it even more a star.”
65- “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.”
66- “You’re so stupid, Rose! – Jack Dawson”
67- “[Storytelling is] always about the characters and about how those characters express something that the audience is feeling. So it has to have some universality to it having to do with relationships, where it’s parent/child, male/female, whatever it is. And then you have to take them on a journey. And then you have to make it excruciating somehow.”
68- “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.”
69- “Well, I see our potential destruction and the potential salvation as human beings coming from technology and how we use it, how we master it and how we prevent it from mastering us.”
70- “Your imagination can create a reality.”
James Cameron Quotes
71- “If I never touch film again, I’d be happy. Filmmaking is not about film, not about sprockets. It’s about ideas, it’s about images, it’s about imagination, it’s about storytelling. If I had the cameras I’m using now when I was shooting Titanic (1997), I would have shot it using them.”
72- “I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.”
73- “I went from driving a truck to becoming a movie director, with a little time working with Roger Corman in between. When I wrote The Terminator (1984), I sold the rights at that time – that was my shot to get the film made. So I’ve never owned the rights in the time that the franchise has been developed. I was fortunate enough to get a chance to direct the second film and do so on my own creative terms, which was good. But that was in 1991 and I’ve felt like it was time to move on. The primary reason for making a third one was financial, and that didn’t strike me as organic enough a reason to be making a film.”
74- “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.”
75- “As much as I love Star Wars (1977) and as much as it’s really revolutionized the imaging business, it went off the rails in the sense that science fiction, historically, was a science fiction of ideas. It was thematic fiction. It stopped being that and became just pure eye candy and pure entertainment. And I miss that. With Alita: Battle Angel (2019). I’m going to flirt with that darker, dystopian message as much as I can, without making it an art film.”
76- “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.”
77- ” “With digital 3D projection, we will be entering a new age of cinema. Audiences will be seeing something which was never technically possible before the age of digital cinema – a stunning visual experience which ‘turbocharges’ the viewing of the biggest, must-see movies.”
78- “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.”
79- “They were extremely hesitant about going over $4 million. We convinced them this movie could not be made for less than $6 million, especially with Arnold Schwarzenegger starring, because he commanded a significant salary; the final shooting budget was actually $6.5 million.”
80- “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 Quotes
81- “If they come up with a decent script that you like and you think you can play, do something cool, and they pay you an awful lot of money, you should just go do it. Don’t feel like you’re betraying me or anything else.”
82- “Well, dammit, I did the first one and I did the second one and it’s my creation and I should do the third one. But ultimately, that’s a stupid reason to spend a year, year and a half of your life in hell to make a big movie. I’d rather spend a year of my life in hell to make something new, which is what I will be doing.”
83- “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.”
84- “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.”
85- “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.”
86- “I’ve always enjoyed it when it was John Woo in his Hong Kong days like Lat sau san taam (1992), but I think it’s overused now.”
87- “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.”
88- “When i was lying in the V.A. hospital with a big hole blown through the middle of my life, i started having these dreams of flying. I was free. But sooner or later, you always have to wake up.”
89- “All I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.”
90- “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 Quotes
91- “Donald Lydecker: Alcoholism is not a disease, it’s a failing. You’ve turned it into a church. You worship the altar of self-pity. I come to these rooms for one reason, to remember what I don’t want to become… helpless, impotent, and weak.”
92- “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.”
93- “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.”
94- “A director’s job is to make something happen and it doesn’t happen by itself. So you wheedle, you cajole, you flatter people, you tell them what needs to be done. And if you don’t bring a passion and an intensity to it, you shouldn’t be doing it.”
95- “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.”
96- “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.”
97- “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.”
98- “Of the three that we’re planning, it’s a question of the order, one’s historical and two are science fiction. None are ocean.”
99- “People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn’t really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things.”
100- “Nature’s imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.”
James Cameron Quotes
101- “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.”
Conclusion
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