It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word.
When I don't have a story to tell, I'm a terror to live with.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses how vital storytelling is to Spielberg's identity and mood. Without a narrative to engage with, he feels difficult to be around.
Steven Spielberg highlights the deep connection between storytelling and personal well-being in this quote. He suggests that storytelling is not just a professional endeavor but a fundamental part of who he is; it gives him purpose and joy. Without a narrative to explore, he admits that he can become irritable and challenging to be around, underscoring the importance of creative expression in maintaining one's happiness and stability.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of creativity in personal wellbeing.
More from Steven Spielberg
All quotes βWhen I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it's you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.
I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.
From a very young age, my parents taught me the most important lesson of my whole life: They taught me how to listen. They taught me how to listen to everybody before I made up my own mind. When you listen, you learn. You absorb like a sponge - and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time.
I wanted to do another movie that could make us laugh and cry and feel good about the world. I wanted to do something else that could make us smile. This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.
There are so many rumours about so many of us in the public eye. Sometimes it's too hard to deny what is not true.
Similar quotes
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.
I've always considered myself an actor first and foremost.
Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.
Sweet bird, that shun the noise of folly, most musical, most melancholy!
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.