Quotes from Richard Linklater

Our country needs more tough critics like you who don't just swallow the hype like everyone else. So many writers might as well be on the payroll — be it entertainment industry or government.

As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.

I hate how the media tries to control our minds. It's a new form of very subtle fascism.

Why is it you become obsessed with people you don't like that much?

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.

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.

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.

I'm the kid who wanted to grow up and be Bugs Bunny. I was very, very disappointed when I realized I couldn't grow up and be a cartoon character.

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

The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure, while always arriving.

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.

I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American.

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

I guess I was just always one of those guys who asked those fundamental questions: 'Who am I? What's this for? Why? What does this mean? Is this real?' All these pretty basic questions. I like making movies about people who are self-conscious in that way, and are trying to feel their way through the world.

The film culture has no room for ideas. The literary culture has some room, but not less than they should, and the academic culture has a lot, but there's no way to communicate it in a wide way.

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.

The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.

It was always kind of sad when your favorite punk rockers, like Jello Biafra or someone, would say they hate something you like. It was, 'Oh, I thought we were on the same page.'

We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.

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

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.

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.

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

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.