You know, in the film making business no one ever gave you anything.

I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt. It saves so much time.

The future of 3D will be defined by TV.

The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there's an alien world here on Earth.

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.

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 the world.

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.

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.

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.

I believe 3D is inevitable because it's about aligning our entertainment systems to our sensory system. We all have two eyes; we all see the world in 3D. And it's natural for us to want our entertainment in 3D as well. It's just getting the technology - it's really more the business model than the technology piece. We've solved the technology.

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 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.

It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actress. You have to give them something that they can act with.

Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plight may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, i almost certainly will.

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

I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the heart of the actors. 

What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?

The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer.

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.

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.

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.

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 love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.

I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others have not been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.

Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.