John Hawkes Quotations

She should have 60kg. She's won every big race once, if not twice and look how close she is at the weights to Railings (54kg), who has only won a Metropolitan and a Caulfield Cup. I can't believe how well she's got in.

My education was constantly interrupted. I moved around a great deal, had no real sense of home, except for the New England landscape.

I didn't worry about any criticism of the horse, I was happy enough with his earlier runs. He was set for the Derby and he peaked on the right day. It was a pleasing result.

I maintain that if you're a novelist and you go into an art museum, you'll come out a better novelist. And if you paint a picture for an hour you're a better actor at the end of it.

If a musician wants to be an actor, everyone thinks that's pretty cool. But if an actor wants to play a song, even if they've been doing it for 40 years, that's bad news.

He was the first person to befriend me at Harvard. At any rate, in some class the teacher gave us an exercise which I've used ever since.

He's come a long way in a short time.

When I over-prepare, I try to let it all go and forget all about it when the camera rolls, so I can just be present with the other actors and allow what's going to happen to happen without too much preconception.

He's a real nice horse, well-bred and handles himself well,

Hitchhiking was such a pure form of existence. You'd wake up in the morning, and you'd have no idea what your day was going to be. And that's something I've never been able to shake. I loved that.

He was the best. He was phenomenal. You wouldn't get a better jockey. He is probably riding in his twilight now, but he's still capable of competing with the very best,

I thought he did a good job last week but he's drawn badly and that makes it tough, particularly from the 2400m start,

I think that no matter how dark a person is, the more you learn about them, the more you understand about their life, the more you can sympathize with them or even root for them.

I think we've all been misled, at moments in our lives, certainly in school situations, and things like that, with getting with the wrong group briefly, or falling in with someone who we learn the truth about and no longer want to really be with.

Some friends of mine bothered me for a long time about getting on the social networking pages. They were close friends that I liked to mess with, and I think that I kind of enjoyed for a while that it bothered them so much. Now they've just kind of given up.

Just because I've signed his papers doesn't mean he's going to ride. It could be next week, it could be next month, it will be up to me when I feel the time is right.

When you're just starting out, and someone you think is a real storyteller says something good about you, that helps.

When I realized that you can't necessarily be cast in a really great part living in Austin, even when Hollywood comes to town, I got a demo reel together and headed out west.

You don't really ever think you're that crazy person you're playing.

We have good chances in most of the races and that's all you can ask. You need luck to win a race, anywhere.

The only thing I do on a computer is play Texas Hold 'Em, really. Obviously my cell phone is a computer. My car is a computer. I'm on computers every day without actively seeking them out.

When something gets attention so quickly, people sometimes will look for reasons to find fault and tear it down.

I understand why people achieve a level of fame and disappear, I never understood it before, but it's an attractive prospect to walk away from it all.

The speed of the race is a concern. There is not a lot of pace in the race,

Railings will probably head towards a race like The BMW if he comes up OK in the autumn.

As he was telling us about these pleasures, at that very moment, in the ruin and the tall grass, I stepped on a hornets, nest and got stung.

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.

As an actor, you don't often get a chance to know exactly the impact of what the audience is seeing, even though you can ask where the frame is. A move that feels tiny can be huge, and vice versa.

It was always planned for the Epsom to be his third run back, ... He's ready but he needs luck.

It's all experience. He's still learning. The more experience he gets, the better he'll be,

It's not like every director in every movie is seeking me out by any means, there are a lot of things I'm not suited for, a lot of things I'm not interested in, and a lot of things that directors wouldn't be interested in me for.

It's ridiculous, it's crippling the industry. Owners are suffering, they are losing interest. It's so frustrating.

It's much more interesting to watch someone who is ill-equipped to solve their problem fight to solve their problem than wallow in the knowledge that they're ill-equipped to solve their problems.

Once I started to write prose, I certainly did not envy the poets. I've mocked poets and poetry ever since I began writing fiction.

In my earliest childhood, we seemed to move back and forth between New York City and Connecticut until I was about eight or ten years old.

In the time between when you first read a script and are offered the role and the time when you begin to shoot, I really love putting in the time and work on that and getting a solid backstory to a character and researching all that I can about what that person does for a vocation or their upbringing or where they're from.

I guess you can say that every actor is a 'character actor' on some level. But I think some actors have a wider range. I think that's how you get that mantle.

Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day.

But he's got a long way to go to get to the Derby. It's entirely up to him how he copes along the way as to how far he'll go this spring. He ran only once last season because he was still immature and is not mentally there yet. But he's doing the right things and I hope he continues to go ahead. If he can't cope, I'll turn him out.

I don't really try to judge any character that I play, afterwards I figure it out, but while I'm working on the character, I have to find something in them to relate to.

Because of my father's dislocated life, I knew intuitively that I wanted to have as few jobs as possible by the time I was married.

I'd said to my sweetheart a couple of days before that the SAG and Spirit Award nomination was amazing and I had no attachment to the Academy Award. I knew I was an underdog so I just decided to sleep through the announcement.

I doubt he will run but you never rule anything out. I just want to see how he pulls up this week before I work out where we go with him,

You couldn't miss him, he was just a natural with balance and maturity,

The earliest memory in Connecticut that I can think of has to do with a riding stable that abutted against the property of my grandfather.

The changes are big and bold, and so the 'Change' launch campaign is big and bold. But that's the idea -- great tempting food that is surprisingly from McDonald's.

You never really forget who you are. If you did, you'd need to seek some professional help

Motive is never easy. Sometimes it occurs to one only later.

I do all kinds of roles - nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho - and occasionally someone kind of normal. It's weird, when I lived in Austin I was always cast as pretty normal people. But when I moved to Los Angeles I was immediately branded a psycho

I went to a performance of 'The Crucible' at the Guthrie when I was a sophomore in high school, and I knew right away that that's what I wanted to do

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am

I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that's where I commented someplace on hearing.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.

If you're telling a story it's always best not to play the ending.

I want people to believe me when I play a part and they are less apt to if they know a lot about me and have associations about me.

I think we're all mysteries to ourselves.

I met Robert Rodriguez working on a movie called 'Roadracers.'

I lived in Texas for 10 years.

I generally play strong people and scary people.

I don't mean to be highfalutin about it, but I try to limit my visibility.

I don't have actor training myself.

For me and for I'm sure any actor, each role is a different challenge to prepare for in a different way.

Even the small amount of infamy I have makes me uncomfortable - on a personal level and on a professional level.

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.

It's nice to sometimes get things out of life, rather than stealing from other artists. I'm trying to steal from the real people.

A lot of times, you just don't get the jobs you want to get.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

It's hard to get concert tickets.

It's probably odd for someone to read an interview where the interviewee is worried about exposure while they're talking in an interview.

Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.

I have to be careful of what TV shows I choose, particularly ones that have commercials in them, because it's going to be a different kind of television show.

The writer should always serve as his own angleworm —and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better.

It seems like every year Hollywood makes an attempt to retell the Manson story, and I just couldn't be less interested in it. It's not really our crowning achievement as a civilisation. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it just bores me.

I've never had any delusions about being a leading man, and it's not sour grapes to say that in the best films that I've always enjoyed, the cliched leading man type isn't a part of the picture.

I'm just looking for the best story being told by the best people and the best part that I can find. If those things add up, I want to be a part of it whether it's a studio film or, more likely in that instance, an independent film.

It's tough being an actor making music, because even I have a knee-jerk reaction to that.

Part of the way that I work is to observe.

People have said unkind things and you kind of have to, if you happen to read it, you have to just, you know, move on.

Starting in the mid-'80s, I played in a band called Meat Joy, and we made our own record, toured.

'The New York Times' thing... I think any actor would be thrilled to be profiled in that paper.

There's a lot of skeletons in my closet!

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

My fear now is of cliche, of complacency, of not being able to feel authenticity in myself and those around me.