"I am more of a visual person than a verbal person."
— George Lucas
"Don't avoid the cliches — they are cliches because they work!"
— George Lucas
"It changed for the good and the bad. When you bring new things to a society, it's like the balance of the force, you can either use it for good or you can use it for evil. What happens when there is something new is people have a tendency to overdo it, they abuse it. There are two things that got abused with Star Wars and it's still being abused. When Star Wars came out, everyone said it's a silly movie, just a bunch of space battles and stuff...There's more to it than that but everyone said it's just a bunch of spaceships...that part of the science fantasy got terribly abused. So everyone went out and made spaceship movies and they were all horrible and lost tons of money. The other part is the technology...especially when it came down later to digital technology, where you can really do anything. Which people just abused, which they did with colour, they did with sound. Whenever someone brings a new tool, everyone just abuses it and you forget the fact there's actually a story. The other thing that got abused...the studios said "Wow we can make a lot of money, this is a license to kill" and the only way you can do that is not take chances. Do something that's proven. You have to remember that Star Wars came from nowhere, American Graffiti came from nowhere. There was nothing like it. Now if you do anything that's not a sequel or a TV series or looks like one, they won't do it. That's the downside of Star Wars and it really shows the enormous lack of imagination and creativity on the part of the industry."
— George Lucas, Interview with Charlie Rose
.
. "The issue that we are discussing here in terms of multi-media literacy that we stress so hard learning English and learning English grammar and then we shove music and art — and most schools don't get into cinema...we move those into some sort of "artistic" which means "therapeutic" or "fun" thing. It's not approached as a very valid form of communication. Kids know this. When you take a five year old...they know intuitively know all the rules but nobody ever taught them anything. We go through school, we learn the grammar of English, punctuation, capital letters, run-on-sentences, what a verb is, but nobody teaches anybody what screen direction is, what perspective is, what color is, what a diagonal line means. Those are rules, those are grammatical rules that you can learn in an arts class. You learn that a jagged line means this, a blue color means this, a red color means that. If you want to communicate to somebody that what you want to do is excite them, you use red or yellow. If you are doing with music, you use a fast rhythm not a slow rhythm. You don't need to teach them how to read music or how to be an artist, but you need to teach them the grammar of the language. But somehow we have gotten to a point that words are [high], and the other forms of communication are [below], when originally they were all equal."
— Lucas, interview in 2012 at a Conference given at Edutopia, an education institution founded and patronized by him.
Francis Ford Coppola: The three of us are here today because we know what a great honor it is to win an academy award for directing.
Steven Spielberg: Yeah, it was the greatest honor I've ever received.
George Lucas: Hey guys, I've never won an Academy Award.
Steven Spielberg: So, why are you here?
George Lucas: I dunno, I got nominated a couple of times.
Francis Ford Coppola: So anyway, the two of us (indicating himself and Spielberg) know what a great honor it'll be for one of the five nominees.
George Lucas: I just wanna say that it's much better to give than to receive."
Spielberg and Coppola: No, it's not.
Steven Spielberg: Yeah, it was the greatest honor I've ever received.
George Lucas: Hey guys, I've never won an Academy Award.
Steven Spielberg: So, why are you here?
George Lucas: I dunno, I got nominated a couple of times.
Francis Ford Coppola: So anyway, the two of us (indicating himself and Spielberg) know what a great honor it'll be for one of the five nominees.
George Lucas: I just wanna say that it's much better to give than to receive."
Spielberg and Coppola: No, it's not.
— 2007 Oscars, where Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg prepared a short skit before reading the nominees and ultimately awarding Martin Scorsesenote .
Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives. And you can either help somebody, you can be compassionate toward people, or you can treat some people with dignity or not. And — and one way you become a hero, and the other way, you know, you’re part of the problem. And it’s — it’s not a grand thing. You know, you don’t have to get into a giant laser sword fight and blow up three spaceships to become a hero. I mean, it’s a very small thing that happens every day of your life.
— George Lucas, Interview with Bill Moyers for The Mythology of ‘Star Wars’.
"My films have a tendency to promote personal self-esteem, a you-can-do-it attitude. Their message is: 'Don’t listen to everyone else. Discover your own feelings and follow them. Then you can overcome anything."
— George Lucas
