Quotes from Peter Hedges

The Orpheus myth is my favorite myth, and the prodigal son is my favorite parable.

I've always had an acute sense of mortality, maybe because my father's a minister.

Over the course of my creative life, I've trafficked in broken, heroic mothers.

New York just feels real to me, and not everyone is in the movie business.

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.

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

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

When I go home to Iowa, people assume I live in this very big anonymous place where no one knows each other or wants to. Truth is, I know my neighbors better in Brooklyn than I ever did in Iowa.

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.

When I was a young lad just out of college at the North Carolina School of the Arts, I directed several plays that I wrote. It was essential theater, meaning we had no money, so our set may be six stools and two chairs and eight cream pies.

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

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.

You could cast nearly any movie in Brooklyn, and now you can film in Brooklyn - for you have studios.

The more Christian you are in this town, the more makeup you wear. I've always thought that it's because if you were to die suddenly, you'd look better for God.

My sister is not an ugly woman. I don't know if there's a better person around.

I stared at her - unable to accept that at one time I was growing inside her. I was once just a couple of cells. My father and my mother were naked something had to be satisfactory about it, because he came inside her and she got pregnant. She, like me, was once a baby in her mother's stomach and so on and so forth and so it goes. So it goes.

Anyway, they took her body to McBurney's Funeral Home in Motley. They'll be planting her tomorrow.

You're shrinking Gilbert, you're shrinking! Shrinking, shrinking, shrinking!

He looks like an American. In fact, he behaves like one. When he tried to pick up the first kid he knocked down, he smashed into several others, it snowballed, chaos ensued. My brother very much resembled America today in pretty much all things.

The more Christian you are in this town, the more makeup you wear.

A bad dream. You were having a bad dream. Oh, I say. Is that what I'm having?

I can go at any time now. -Arnie tells Becky

I could go at any time now.