J. J. Abrams

I love the idea of anthropomorphizing machines. I love the idea of taking technology and giving it a personality.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

I'd love to do a movie where the monster is human, where the issue is not otherworldly, or horror or science fiction.

I love recording music.

Making movies was more a reaction to not being chosen for sports. Other kids were out there playing at whatever I was off making something blow up and filming it, or making a mould of my sister's head using alginating plaster.

When I was a little kid - and even still - I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made - at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do magic.

When I was a kid going into the movies, you weren't force-fed information everywhere you looked about what the movie was going to be.

I have nothing against 3-D in theory. But I've also never run to the movies because something's in 3-D.

I love movies with spectacle but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn't have to be a creature.

What I'm still grappling with and learning how to do is to be looking and thinking cinematically, having come from television.

One of my favorite things about 'Star Trek' wasn't just the overt banter but the humor in that show about the relationships between the main characters and their reactions to the situations they would face there was a lot of comedy in that show without ever breaking its reality.

I hope to make movies that are so small they don't need to make anything to be profitable.

All the times I've been lucky enough to be a part of a show that's actually gotten on the air, it's always that same mixture of excitement and utter fear.

I find that it's hard to fully examine one's life and not have faith be part of the discussion.

It's a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling.

I think when you're 10 years old, it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things.

I mean, my dad's a television producer, and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do.

My mother is the coolest, most amazing person I know.

I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.

We live in an age of instant knowledge. And there's almost a sense of entitlement to that.