Top 55 Robert Redford Quotes

Radio, newspapers, they were normal parts of my life. In those days, you had to go somewhere to watch television and leave something to see it.

People are becoming more and more aware of how the dominance of development and business is altering their lives and, in particular, their own heritage.

I’m not a facelift person. I am what I am.

I think documentary filmmakers need as much protection as possible under journalist’s privilege. How else is the public to know what is going on?

I started as an actor in the theater playing a lot of character parts, and suddenly, I found myself in this place where it felt like I was getting locked into a kind of a stereotype, and it did bother me.

I haven’t seen ‘The Revenant,’ but I’m sure it was great because it has a lot of talent involved.

Lastly get emotionally connected to your story so you can deliver it, you know, if you can’t deliver the emotions to your script there’s no point to your story. Story is the key.

I had just arrived in New York from California. I was nineteen years old and excited beyond belief. I was an art student and an acting student and behaved as most young actors did – meaning that there was no such thing as a good actor, ’cause you yourself hadn’t shown up yet.

I am passionate. I am political about my country, about what it is, how strong it is, how strong it remains.

It’s hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don’t think it’s necessarily broader or smarter.

I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell’s notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we’re close to that.

Once the festival achieved a certain level of notoriety, then people began to come here with agendas that were not the same as ours. We can’t do anything about that. We can’t control that.

I’m not a left-wing person. I’m just a person interested in the sustainability of my country.

I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.

I love making films more than anything, but it’s tough.

I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.

When you get older, you learn certain life lessons. You apply that wisdom, and suddenly you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new lease on this thing. So let’s go.’

Sundance was started as a mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent.

Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.

I think independent filmmakers, documentary filmmakers – they are journalists.

I wanted to get out of this country and experience different ways of seeing the world. So I went to Europe, but I went as an artist. I was increasing my skill set and exploring storytelling through painting.

Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn’t go too far out of the box.

I’m not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.

He’s meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules – a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness – the temptations of life.

The Right has such antiquated ideas – if they took charge, I think they’d want to close the parks, open the land up for development. It’s an ongoing battle to keep the parks strong.

I did not, like my children and people today, grow up with television as part of my life.

I really do miss being able to go through life a little less noticed.

Hollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to. I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood – I was born next door.

Well first of all it’s a business and it’s a tough business, and you have to have the strength to survive all the set backs all the failures that make this a mean business, that’s getting meaner and meaner every year in my opinion.

‘Butch Cassidy’ was the only film I ever enjoyed making.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

I don’t think about when it’s going to stop and what you do before it stops. You just keep moving.

I didn’t know the technical language of filmmaking, so I said, ‘OK, I’m going to do my own storyboard,’ because I had to explain to the crew and the technical people what I wanted.

Any time I saw people treated unfairly because of race, creed, whatever – it struck a nerve.

Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played – skiing, baseball, fishing – there is no greater example than golf, because you’re playing against yourself and nature.

There is nothing I can do about this stuff and I am pretty well ok with the fact that I think Sundance is not going to be stopped by it, because he Festival is itself now, and doesn’t need me out there to talk about it like I did years ago.

The way you really find out about the performer’s seriousness about the cause is how long they stay with it when the spotlight gets turned off. You see a lot of celebrities switch gears. They go from the environment to animal rights to obesity or whatever. That I don’t have a lot of respect for.

I began by doing a lot of character work on TV, just fun acting parts.

We program the festival, after 20 years, exactly the way we did on the first day.

Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It’s harder and harder to find what the truth is.

What I would like to do is a thriller. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time, but one that was not at all dependent on special effects. Just purely psychological, but will scare the hell out of you. That’s what I would like to do. I have not found it yet.

When I started, I was an artist; I wanted to be an artist. I became an actor almost by accident. I acted for fifteen years and tried to produce. I looked for stories that were the story beneath the story that you thought you knew, like ‘The Candidate’.

When I was a kid, nobody told me I was good-looking. I wish they had. I would’ve had a better time.

I’m interested in that thing that happens where there’s a breaking point for some people and not for others. You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there’s no sign that it’s going to get any better, and that’s the point when people quit. But some don’t.

I never had a problem with my face on screen. I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by actors and actresses that tried to keep themselves young.

The important thing about a sport is the people who devote their lives to it.

In fact you’ve got your hands tied behind your back when somebody chooses to take a low road in to you, there is nothing you can do about it, and so you just live with it and move on.

I’m not much interested in sport just as sport. I wouldn’t be interested in making a golf film or baseball or fishing film.

For me, the Sundance Institute is just an extension of something I believed in, which is creating a mechanism for new voices to have a place to develop and be heard.

I think a lot of people thought my career started with Butch Cassidy.

I had a mild case of polio – not enough to put me in an iron lung, but enough to keep me bedridden for weeks. As I came out of it, my mom wanted to do something for me. She realized that, growing up in the city, I’d missed out on a lot of nature.

I’m always drawn to stories that people don’t know about, particularly when they’re inside of a story that everyone knows about.

As an actor and as a person you come together with being in familiar territory although that has not been my whole life. That’s been a part of it. I think a lot of people associate me with the west because of Sundance.

I’ve always felt that almost every part I’ve played has been a character part. I mean, I look at it that way. I can’t help how I look or how I seem to people.

When people start thinking of you more as a persona, they are less inclined to allow you to move into different areas. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re just very stereotypical or restricted in their own thinking of what they’ll allow you to do.