Top 45 Peter Hedges Quotes

I never try to think I have the answer to what people should do or not do.

Something happened to me when I wrote female characters in my early plays; it was a real liberation.

So, yes, I wrote a script called ‘Ben Is Back’ that I got to make with a bunch of remarkable artists and craftspeople.

I feel cool when I say I live in Brooklyn.

I try, in my films, to normalize things that maybe 20 or 30 years ago a film would have been about. ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ needed its own film, but now blended families you see all the time.

It’s not easy to be a good or wise parent. You do the best you can.

I grew up in a very loving but very broken family, and I suppose that’s why I’m drawn to telling stories about well-intentioned people who are doing their best – but are not always successful – in figuring out how to maneuver through this complicated, bumpy and broken world.

My formative years were all shaped by a mother who was very sad and had a drinking problem, while my father was lonely and angry. He was an Episcopal priest and raised four kids on his own.

Maudlin scenes where people pour their heart out to one another? I don’t want to see it.

I can go years without going to Los Angeles, but I think my living in Brooklyn is critical to my continuing to have a fairly happy life in the film industry.

My older son works in finance and private equity, which he loves, and Lucas works in film and theater.

There are so many films I lean on and look toward and return to that give me some guidance on how to keep moving in the world, and that’s what film does, at its best.

Well, because my films are really about how people interact with each other, and the complexity, and the nuance, and the surprise of those moments I try to create a safe enough space that allows the actors to operate from their own instincts. My direction is more suggestions, prompts or questions.

In my family, if something were to have happened with one of my kids, I think my wife would be the tougher one.

When you have an intimate encounter with mortality as my family and I did with my mom’s death, I took a long look at my life and I asked myself what was the one thing that I hadn’t done that I had really wanted to do. And it was to write and direct a film.

Lucas is living the life that I wanted, but I want to be clear, I don’t feel there’s been any pressure for him to live it.

The most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written is my second novel, called ‘An Ocean in Iowa.’ That is pretty close to my childhood.

I want to make a series of films of contemporary America that feel urgent and deal with sometimes-topical matters, but hopefully in a universal way.

And for better or worse, a story like ‘Pieces of April’ is the kind of story I’m supposed to tell. The kind of story that makes you laugh as much as possible but also breaks your heart.

Harold and Maude’ is a film I just keep finding myself rewatching.

Everything good in my life can be traced back to my mother’s sobriety. She showed me that broken people can – with the help of others – turn themselves around.

My mother’s sobriety – that’s when I found the theater, that’s when I moved from being a basketball player to being a musician, to being an actor, to then being a writer.

I play this game with my son called Never Seen. We try to see new things every day, and we do. I don’t take that for granted.

I’m interested in stories that help me, people navigate in this broken world.

There’s no reason that a writer, if they have some discipline and curiosities and passion, can’t be vital for a long, long time.

Pieces of April’ was going to be a 3 to 7 million dollar film and we had three entities, two studios, and one wealthy man and they all backed out. It was quite a blow.

I think the best dramas are as funny as possible and the best comedies have, underneath them, real substance.

The kinds of movies I make are not easy to get made.

Black people are more likely to be incarcerated than white people. That’s just a fact and it’s regrettable and it’s got to change.

I once heard a story, it’s probably apocryphal, but I love the notion. That a car had flipped over and the baby was trapped underneath the car and the mother was thrown from the car. Then the mother lifted up the car to pull her child to safety. And I believe that my own strength comes from whom and what I love.

The job in every re-write is to make it harder for your characters to get the thing that they need.

I completely hold on to the idea that people are eager if not desperate to be told a good story.

So much of writing is about what characters don’t say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.

There was a part of me that wanted to take my place next to, you know, Debra Granik. She’s such a hero for me.

I wanted to direct long before I’d even written a screenplay.

Let the story lead you. If the story needs to be dark, let it go dark. If it’s a sweet, good-for-the-world story, that’s what it is.

I used to find limitations frustrating, but I find them enormously liberating.

The greatest love I believe… the greatest love I have is for my children, but I think the greatest love probably universally is a mother’s love for a child.

Family is paramount to me in my life, and my own comes first above everything, and that’s something universal that people can relate to.

I’m looking, often, towards younger people, listening to how they’re working, at least they’re trying, and some of the old greats, too. Just to try to remain relevant and off-balance, but hungry and eager.

I’ve read both books that ‘Beautiful Boy’ is based on, and I can’t wait to see that film. I root for that film.

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

If you wanted John Gielgud to cry, he could say, ‘Which eye?’

I love films that take place over a short period of time, and I feel that those films are in our cinematic DNA.

I grew up going to funerals and visiting people in nursing homes. I’m not as afraid of dealing with the dying as maybe some other people may be.