Quotes from Richard Linklater

If you want to just make a good movie, if you don't enjoy every step and become a master of each little moment, then you shouldn't be doing it.

It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can't avoid that.

I always think that I'm still this 13-year old boy that doesn't really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I'll really have to do it.

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

I'm interested in people forging their realities.

I loved 'Goodbye to Language.'

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.

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.

The theatrical marketplace is a challenge. What do you have to do to get someone to purchase a movie ticket to your movie? You have to do something that they've never seen before; you've got to enthrall them in a new way.

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.

When I did 'Slacker,' I didn't own cowboy hats or boots. I was like, 'That's not me.'

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

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

I wrote a script - a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn't get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.

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.

Being alone is better than sitting next to a lover and feeling lonely.

The worst thing is that you used to be able to show interesting films on campuses. Those places are all gone.

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.

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.

Every day's a hustle.

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.

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 liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.