Quotes from Peter Hedges

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

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

People are usually pretty hungry after a funeral. I guess it's because we all realize that time is running out and we better eat all we can. Please don't mention that to my mother.

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.

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

There are very few topics where I can imagine that you might not find humor. And I was stunned at how much weird and dark humor there was when my mom died.

There are sections of the film that I don't love. There are moments that really lift and elevate, and then there are parts that feel clunkier to me. But the totality of 'Harold and Maude' is so much greater than maybe other films that are more perfect or look more beautiful or handle every moment more exquisitely.

I've wanted to direct for a long time, but it had to be a story I wanted to tell. The writer's job is to find the story that he should tell.

I wouldn't say I'm a religious person, but I am definitely inclined toward asking the big questions.

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

Is my job as a child, even as an adult, is my job to heal the wounds of my parents' childhoods?

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

So much of life's dramas, good and bad, play out against family and so it's really inspiring for any number of stories in all the fields I write in.

When I did 'Gilbert Grape,' Lasse Hallstrom let me be on the set with him and in the editing room and in the casting sessions and so on. And so I got a firsthand, rather intimate, high-pressure look at how to make a film.

If there's a photo of a roomful of kids I'm the one with the biggest smile or my hand over my face.

People love conversation, and movies are conversations, and an audience has to participate; it has to fill in some blanks.

I don't know anything about directing, but if you love actors, know your story and hire a great company, then anyone can direct a film.

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.

One of the great kicks of having a movie made is that you envision this world.

I'm the lucky father to two young men. When any of your kids, and your parents feel this way about you, clearly, when your kids find what they love to do and they throw themselves into it, and they find joy in the doing of it, and it's actually work that's honorable, and, you know, all of those things, it's a great feeling.

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.

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.

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.

I've always written for actors, and if you want to write for good actors, you have to write parts that are surprising, that are human, and that allow them to go to a wide range of places.