Richard Linklater Quotations

Well, you have to keep your faith in the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people who are actively looking for something interesting, people who have been disappointed so many times.

The truth will only be told over a career.

Before Sunrise did very well internationally. It made as much in Italy and Korea as it did here.

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.

Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

I think you get in trouble if you make experimental big studio films.

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

I always sensed instinctively from the earliest age that I was being lied to.

It's disappointing to see films become pure entertainment, so that it's not an art form.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

Hollywood has a way of sucking the world's talent to it.

I think I got really lucky with Slacker. That was a film that probably shouldn't have been seen.

I worked offshore as an oil worker for a couple of years.

I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

I do find myself at the moment, due to the success of School of Rock, to be on people's radar a little.

I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing.

I've never been a guy who had more than a toe in Hollywood anyway, so my toe is more easily lopped off than most.

The worst thing is that you used to be able to show interesting films on campuses. Those places are all gone.

Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they'll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.

Everyone is encouraged to see their lives, the world through the eyes of the rich.

I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.

So I was saving up my money and bought a Super 8 camera, projector, some editing equipment, a bunch of film stock, and moved to Austin.

You're talking about the outsiders in society and how they deal with it and how they justify what they do. I can relate to that.

I don't want to glorify robbing banks, but I come from a world that shares Willis's view, that banks and so on are the biggest crooks of them all.

The big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what’s the right way to tell a particular story.

We all give ourselves a lot of leeway, but we want consistency from other people.

Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.

I always think that I’m still this 13-year old boy that doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll really have to do it.

It's kinda like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road, and instead of just passing and glancing away, they decide to accept what he calls the confrontation between their souls. It's like freeing the brave, reckless gods within us all.

I'd be fine to make movies and have them never come out. But you have to deal with the business side. You can't get too emotionally invested, because again, you've got no control. There's going to be some huge film out that everyone goes to, and it probably won't be mine.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.

There are so many great artists, I think, who kind of suffer from being icons, legends, acknowledged masters.

You make a film and you can't really pick the way it's put to the public. You control the content, but the way it's marketed, or the poster, or what they're telling the public about the film, it's beyond you. Some people don't even see them, because they think they already know it. That can be frustrating, when something you've done is marketed in a way you think is antithetical to what it is.

That's the history of art - you have to consider yourself fortunate if you ever get acknowledged. If you have a critical success that's also a financial success and that you feel good about... If things line up, that's pretty rare.

It has to be very tight to seem loose.

If you establish rules and play by them, the audience will buy in.

To those humans in whom I have faith; I wish suffering, being forsaken, sickness, maltreatment, humiliation. I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the misery of the vanquished. I have no pity for them because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures' . . . Remember, the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

As a teenager, I wanted to write novels. By college, it was theater, plays, and then, shortly, it was film.

In a sea of stories, find the right one to tell, and the right way to tell it.

People think drama drives story, but I think the comedy is really the heart and soul.

It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism.

The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure, while always arriving.

Monogamy, monotony. There's only a couple of letters...

As we know from our government, the more power you have, the more of a bureaucrat you are, and the more ego you have invested in being right, the greater the odds are that you will never change your opinion.

I didn't have any set idea of what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to tell stories that meant something to me, but I never said I was going to be the weird, avant-garde guy.

When you're trying to get laid, everything's great, but once you've been with someone eight years and the future is not finite, you have time to sit and really examine every little thing that irritates you.

Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they are actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social hierarchy before it rejects them. The dictionary defines slackers as people who evade duties and responsibilities. A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for.

The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything.

I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.

The rules of parenting have changed. By the modern definition, we were a generation of neglected children.

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

I think maybe making films is something innate you can't really teach to begin with.

I'm lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don't even make a big distinction between them. No one believes this, but it's the same. I'm the same person, trying to make it work. I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

I can't help but think that at the end of your life, when you look back, there'll be a tone. And that tone will come from the essence of how you live your day to day what you did in that between time because that is really your life.

Being alone is better than sitting next to a lover and feeling lonely.