Top 60 Noah Baumbach Quotes

Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.

We all have these notions of cool that come about at different points in our lives, and it’s interesting in how it evolves or doesn’t evolve in different people.

I think all my movies are about transitions to some degree.

There’s something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don’t know what their reaction will be.

I love black-and-white movies that are about contemporary subjects.

I think I was going through a lot of change at 27, but I didn’t know it was happening until it was over.

I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we’re shooting, and that’s always a challenge because, unfortunately, people on the street don’t know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.

Other people have worked with big studios and maintained control over their movies. I see no reason why it wouldn’t work for me.

It’s kind of major, learning to drive. I feel like it kicked up other stuff in my life.

There are the people who overthink making mix CDs and playlists, and how that works generationally is all really interesting to me.

There is an isolated experience to being a director. It’s very communal because there’s a crew, but it’s only you. You’re the one on the hook.

I try to procrastinate, if I can, productively, like I’ll work on something else as procrastination. Or I take a walk. Because often I find, if you get out, more things come to you.

Even fairly serious moviegoers can’t shake this shadow of the corporate world.

I’m good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers – I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you’re only supposed to flip a burger once.

Being funny, in some ways, is about being connected to psychology.

Peter Bogdanovich is a good friend.

Friends of friends had bands in college or in their early 20s and had a moment where they had some kind of interest from a record label or manager. It’s always interesting how people handle those decisions and those moments.

Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.

I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I’ve thought about writing a novel.

‘Frances Ha’ is the closest final product to what I had in my head of any movie I’ve made. I’m not entirely even sure why that is.

I watch movies all the time, so it’s hard to pick certain specific directors that have inspired me in the aggregate.

I didn’t train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.

It’s going to start really interfering with your quality of life, your health, if you don’t adjust to life as it’s happening to you.

When I start a movie, there will be certain films that I watch again just because the vibe seems right.

I do like having books on my shelves. I do value that life.

A film set becomes its own family anyway, and all family dynamics come out during a shoot. The trick is hiring people who know how to handle that.

My dad was a great movie companion. He wouldn’t diminish ‘The Jerk.’ If I liked it, he liked it. He could see it through my eyes.

I wouldn’t say ‘Frances Ha’ is autobiographical, but it’s definitely very personal.

I graduated in ’91, so the ’90s for me were very much the first years out of school, so I can’t really look at that decade as independent of my own experience of my 20s, really.

I always viewed life as material for a movie.

As a kid, I thought of myself as a funny person who secretly wanted to be serious, but now I think maybe I’m a serious person who secretly wants to be funny.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don’t actually know what it’s going to be, but I’m still striving to get to some place with it.

I’ve run into more people walking in L.A. than if I drove. Because you stand out so much if you walk. People from my past have stopped their cars and said, ‘Hey!’ But if I was in a car, they never would’ve seen me.

That’s the nice thing about collaborating with someone: Your work becomes a conversation.

How you start the movie is critical. And how often you feel that there’s no reason for how it’s starting.

Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.

I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Good Solider’ or something I wasn’t equipped to understand.

I’m interested in music as an extension of character.

Many of the crew members I work with and continue to work with were friends or have become close friends, and so we keep working together. And I like casting friends of mine or people I know in parts I know would be perfect for them. I like to bring things and people that mean something to me in to my work.

You can be aware that something is idiosyncratic, and give it to a character, but keep doing it.

I’m a huge proponent of therapy and analysis, but it’s something that, in a nonprofessional way, can be abused.

Dance is a profession with an expiration date for many people.

I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so – which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.

To this day, I have people I might meet who will make assumptions about my life based on fictional elements of ‘The Squid And The Whale.’ But I think that’s par for the course if you make something that feels kind of real.

I think I’ve always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.

Wes Anderson’s films, 6-year-olds are crazy about them.

We expect forty-year-olds to have grown up at some point, and to be engaged and adult and take responsibility, and doing nothing would seem to go against that.

‘The Squid and the Whale’ I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.

The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.

I’ve had times in my life when I really haven’t been able to figure myself out.

Woody Allen’s movies are so much a part of me. I grew up watching them over and over and would read all his comic pieces for the New Yorker. In some ways, his influence is so much there that I can’t even locate it any more.

It’s near impossible to make a movie in black and white in the system.

I know people who are incredibly successful who still dress the way they did when they were 18, just because they still think that’s how they look good.

I guess I’m interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with these huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.

I like the way corduroys feel. I like the sort of jean aspect of corduroys, but also the texture of them. They probably remind me of my childhood, too, I think. I wore cords, and my dad had a corduroy jacket.

I’ve always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.

I thought at the time of my parents’ divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager.

I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don’t think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.

There’s always some generational-guys-hanging-out movie that is made every few years, I think, and some of them are great.

I’m sure I’ve said some pretty bad pick-up lines.