Quotes from Greta Gerwig

Whenever you work with someone who you idolize, you realize... he's just a person trying to make a movie as best he knows how. And that doesn't look so different from other people trying to do the same thing.

Everybody is always in the middle of their own opera.

I feel like a good pair of diamond studs goes a long way. They make everything look dressy, and you just seem more put together.

When you're on set, and that clock is going, every second you spend doing something is a second you spend not doing something else. That's true of all of life, but it's very vivid on a film set because you're always managing that.

I was very serious about ballet until the age of 12, at which point my body changed, and it wasn't quite right.

I'm so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn't belong.

I'm far too middle-class to morally object to a paying job.

I was part of a hip-hop group called Fly Style. I was one of two white girls, and I was part of the younger company, which was called Touch of Style. And it was amazing. It gave me a different perception of dance and beauty because the other girls were mostly African-American and Latina.

I'd applied to graduate school for playwriting, and I got rejected by every school. I felt that theatre was closed but that, when it came to film, the door was very slightly ajar. If I have any virtues, it's that I'm good at walking through doors that are slightly ajar.

I thought Mia Hansen-Love was a true auteur, and I always wanted to work with her. Mia's empathy for her characters and her ability to use the language of cinema to communicate real human depth is extraordinary. She's a humanist.

Nobody knows what you have in you until you've done it, so I just keep pushing those boundaries, and I figure it will all come out in the wash.

I like people who love books and movies and art and want to talk about it all the time, because that's basically what I want to talk about. Intellectuals that are funny.

For me, the French new wave is Truffaut and Rohmer. Godard I sometimes have trouble with because he's very much of a director's director. I feel Truffaut is such a humanist, and I always go in that direction.

For Mike Mills, I learned that having dance parties and crying with your cast does not make you a weak director, it makes you a strong director.

I've never had a plan, I've always done things from instinct.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

When you write something you know, you're making a story that will work, whether or not there's bits taken. It's always funny to me when people say, 'Well, it's clearly autobiographical,' and I say, 'Well, how do you know my autobiography?' Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it's a very interesting assumption.

I have a fundamentally hopeful view about people, and that might merely be a reflection of the fact that I've lived an incredibly privileged life in a very wealthy nation without a lot of the struggles that most of the world has to face.

I wouldn't call myself 'into the DJ scene.' I have friends who are DJs, like James Murphy. I was really into the DJ scene at his wedding. But generally, I'm not at the clubs. I've never been to a rave.

I feel like I'm an actor that likes to have lots of points of connection.

I don't really decide what the core of the story is before I write. I write to figure out what the story is. And I think the characters end up talking to you and telling you what they want to be doing and what is important to them. So in some ways, your job is to listen as much as it is to write.

I think that people in their 20s actually aren't given enough credit for their ambition.

I didn't know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.

I loved dance.