Quotes from Ethan Coen

'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.

Don't bang your head against the wall about what you can't do.

In 'True Grit,' we had a vulture, a trained vulture... that was a pain and that was - even by vulture standards - probably a stupid vulture, and that was frustrating.

It's very weird when people you know are in 'Star Wars.'

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

The mountain music... is compelling music in its own right, harking back to a time when music was a part of everyday life and not something performed by celebrities.

There aren't reasons why you like this song or this piece of music, or don't like it. It's just, it's either right or wrong, you know?

It's not that I don't like TV. It's alien to me. I haven't watched a television show in decades.

All we think about is how to keep the audience engaged, and normally we're big on plot because that's the easy way to do it.

Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.

Whatever faith you have, you have that crisis: what am I doing?

I mean, Joel talks to the actors more than I do and I probably do production stuff a little more than he does.

It was never an ambition to grow up and win an Academy Award, so when it happens, you go, 'Weird!'

We haven't had to defend anything to anybody.

We don't outline, so we don't have prospective tasks to divide up. It's just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.

Whenever you're specific with ethnicity or religion, people find reason to take offence.

As kids, we did see the Disney movies and the kids' adventure stories of the day.

It's always tempting to cast someone you enjoy being with. You've got to hang out with these people for a number of months.

We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality.

Like any kind of writing, there are good days and frustrating days. But even frustrating days can be rewarding sometimes.

With 'The Big Lebowski,' we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much as it's about L.A.

People respond to real problems from the heart.

Of course, 'True Grit' is a Western, but we never considered our film a classical Western and honestly never thought about genre at all. We didn't talk about John Ford or Sergio Leone, even though we like their films. Really, we were driven only by our enthusiasm for Charles Portis's book.

Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity, as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to.