Top 77 Richard Linklater Quotes

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

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

As I get older, my emotions are closer to the surface.

For a lot of us, awareness is merely realizing the extent to which we’ve been lied to all our lives. You start educating yourself. You become motivated; you follow your muse where it takes you. And you see the world in a different way. You start making decisions based on what you feel is right.

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

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

I’m not enough of one of those public personalities who feels as though he’s been one-dimensionalized. I don’t feel that strongly enough.

Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There’s a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.

I like films that just put you in someone’s world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you’d care about them.

No one believes this, but when I’m working, it’s the same, whether I’m working on ‘Bad News Bears,’ ‘Before Sunset,’ ‘A Scanner Darkly,’ or ‘Fast Food Nation.’ I’m the same person, trying to make it work.

The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you’re still friends with the rest of your life.

I grew up in a little town in east Texas where it was really not on the table to question certain things like whether you should eat meat or not.

I’m a huge Nagisa Oshima fan. He was one of the most radical Japanese directors to come up in the ’60s.

County jail in some ways can be the most dangerous because it’s often the least regulated.

Here in Central Texas, you drive west, you get the desert; you drive east, you get the woods; you’ve got water, you’ve got urban environments, you’ve got country. So you can hit a lot of notes.

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

I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.

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

It’s just too late to ban all guns. There are 300 million. We should’ve done that after the Civil War – that’s when we should’ve taken away guns and defined what militias were. But we didn’t do it then, and we can’t now.

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

I think people forget how radical the narrative of ‘Slacker’ is. There’s no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.

‘The Newton Boys’ was the one time I’ve made a film with really active characters who weren’t at all self-reflexive and just plowed through their lives. There’s a part of everyone that’s like that. We have a biological imperative to keep living, keep moving forward… We have no choice.

I was dating girls who were actresses, and that was fun, so I took a playwriting class. But that was short-lived. That was one year. Around that time, I was seeing movies that were making me think in terms of images.

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.

Some of our favorite films are obviously not written by the person who directed it. And yet a ‘Taxi Driver,’ or some Nicholas Ray movie, like ‘In a Lonely Place,’ seems so personal or obsessive or whatever.

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

The truth will only be told over a career.

Are any of us self-taught? It just means I didn’t go to school for it. But you do have teachers. You have mentors.

I’ve done my part to ‘ruin’ Austin.

The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You’ve got to find it on your own. If you’re lucky, you do.

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

We emphasize negativity and violence in the media because that’s what grabs everybody’s attention, but in the real world, it’s mostly people being very cooperative and caring and connected and kind. That’s the norm of human experience. And yet, what gets our attention is the very opposite.

There are really smart baseball players. It’s a thinking person’s game.

Every day’s a hustle.

Maybe part of being a dad means that the slightest little thing will make me tear up.

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

I admire people who can just brazenly go through the world.

I have an uncomfortable groove, ’cause I have a lot of different kinds of stories to tell.

Trump has a lot less than he says he does.

I loved ‘Goodbye to Language.’

I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.

I’m interested in people forging their realities.

A certain kind of film is a big theatrical film and a certain kind of film isn’t. It doesn’t bother me so much that you can pick your format.

When you have a film that’s acclaimed, there’s a tendency to go big or get serious or something, but I had an impulse to do the opposite.

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It’s crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

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.

I don’t see the arts as competitive at all. It was a better angel of my nature. Sports is zero-sum: winner, loser, demonstrable.

My dad’s chill. He’s the guy who, you wreck the car, he says, ‘Well, nobody was hurt. It’s just some metal.’

I’ve always been interested in the industrialization of our food; it’s been an issue for me from an environmental and animal rights and human health perspective.

The ’70s kind of sucked.

I always say I’ll never make a film in Austin in summer, but I always end up here.

Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn’t bad. It’s a good lesson in human hubris.

I try to avoid bad experiences.

I realized a long time ago that, even as a kid, it’s all about the choices you make, the things you pursue. In the end, you’re a sum of your choices.

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.

I’ve made movies where people say it’s their favourite, but they don’t take it seriously because it just didn’t seem to break through commercially.

The arts were like, there’s no opponent. It’s just yourself. I’m not saying they don’t make the arts a competition with awards and all that, but that’s outside the work itself.

I guess I don’t have a grandiose view of the world in general, and I never believe it when someone else has a grandiose moment.

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.

If you make a film about childhood, you’ve got to pick a moment – you know, ‘The 400 Blows.’

To jump from the indie ranks to play with the big dogs, there’s a gate you have to pass through.

I remember daydreaming out in the outfield: I wish I had more time. I want to read ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’

I always had that long-term vision. Even getting going with cinema, knowing it was such a long road to be able to make films, but I always had a long term. Whenever I was starting out, I had that patience.

You don’t really grow up until you quit playing sports.

Every college player thinks they’re on their way. But, delusions aside, I might have toiled in the minor leagues for a bit.

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

I remember when I made ‘A Scanner Darkly,’ going, ‘I hope people see it in theater – but I think it’s going to be seen in someone’s room at two in the morning.’ It’s that kind of movie. And I would have loved if it had been available on multiple formats at the moment it opened.

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

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

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

I remember playing for coaches who seemed like military-type guys. It always rubbed me the wrong way.