Richard Linklater Quotes

I have an uncomfortable groove, 'cause I have a lot of different kinds of stories to tell.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

The best thing for your psyche as you try to accomplish anything, really, is to just concentrate on all the little things. And not just as a means to an end, but truly enjoy them.

- Richard Linklater

The human psyche creates structure. We all go through our lives like, 'Oh! And then I moved here.' We're pattern-seeking, structure-producing machines.

- Richard Linklater

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.

- Richard Linklater

'The Newton Boys' was the one time I've made a film with really active characters who weren't at all self-reflexive and just plowed through their lives. There's a part of everyone that's like that. We have a biological imperative to keep living, keep moving forward... We have no choice.

- Richard Linklater

I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.

- Richard Linklater

We emphasize negativity and violence in the media because that's what grabs everybody's attention, but in the real world, it's mostly people being very cooperative and caring and connected and kind. That's the norm of human experience. And yet, what gets our attention is the very opposite.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

I'm kind of an old theater guy, so I'm sort of attuned to it. Like, when I go to New York, I go to plays.

- Richard Linklater

There's a long history of people who spent that $300,000 on their first film and weren't quite ready, and then they never did it again 'cause they were out of synch with where they were, and they would never raise that money again.

- Richard Linklater

I look up and go, 'I'm living in the world I visualized a long time ago.' From making movies, to the Film Society, to just being in a film world. It's a life that I wanted to inhabit. I think everyone has the opportunity to do that in this world - it's just, are you gonna work for it, and how much does it mean to you?

- Richard Linklater

Before Sunrise did very well internationally. It made as much in Italy and Korea as it did here.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

Are any of us self-taught? It just means I didn't go to school for it. But you do have teachers. You have mentors.

- Richard Linklater

Pro athletes, how they go through the world is so elevated. The bubble they're in is one of entitlement. And that starts young. By the time they're in college, they've had it a lot of their life.

- Richard Linklater

Well, you have to keep your faith in the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people who are actively looking for something interesting, people who have been disappointed so many times.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

One minute you're starting left fielder, hitting home runs; the next, it's career over. I was 20.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it's passing, to be in the moment. It's the hardest thing to do. You're either in the unknown future that you're working toward, or you're in the past that becomes a little abstract.

- Richard Linklater

I've done my part to 'ruin' Austin.

- Richard Linklater

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.'

- Richard Linklater

Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There's a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.

- Richard Linklater

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

- Richard Linklater

In interviews, I never wanted to play into the myth of, 'Yeah, I was sitting there doing nothing, and then made 'Slacker.'' No. I'd been making shorts, a Super-8 feature, and running a film society. I always try to stress to people that there's a lot of work involved and years of preparation. But no one wants to hear that part.

- Richard Linklater

It's disappointing to see films become pure entertainment, so that it's not an art form.

- Richard Linklater

I'm not enough of one of those public personalities who feels as though he's been one-dimensionalized. I don't feel that strongly enough.

- Richard Linklater

I'd like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

- Richard Linklater

As a little kid, you go where your parents drag you. You have no agency, no dominion.

- Richard Linklater

Some films really do take years to get going, but I'd say that most of the films I want to do are slightly smaller projects. Some could be sketches. They're not all oil paintings.

- Richard Linklater

I remember daydreaming out in the outfield: I wish I had more time. I want to read 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

When I saw 'subUrbia' on stage, I started having those feelings inside me. I saw it as a film, and I felt I knew the characters, or I was the characters. It really dredged up all this stuff in me that never went away.

- Richard Linklater

I always thought that I had a pretty diverse body of work, I mean, as far as subject matter. Teenage rock and roll movie; romance; '20s Western. On paper it looks different, but then there's similarities in the vibe of them.

- Richard Linklater

I always sensed instinctively from the earliest age that I was being lied to.

- Richard Linklater

I realized a long time ago that, even as a kid, it's all about the choices you make, the things you pursue. In the end, you're a sum of your choices.

- Richard Linklater

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

I do find myself at the moment, due to the success of School of Rock, to be on people's radar a little.

- Richard Linklater

Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they'll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.

- Richard Linklater

No one believes this, but when I'm working, it's the same, whether I'm working on 'Bad News Bears,' 'Before Sunset,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' or 'Fast Food Nation.' I'm the same person, trying to make it work.

- Richard Linklater

Every day's a hustle.

- Richard Linklater

If you make a film about childhood, you've got to pick a moment - you know, 'The 400 Blows.'

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

I remember playing for coaches who seemed like military-type guys. It always rubbed me the wrong way.

- Richard Linklater

As I get older, my emotions are closer to the surface.

- Richard Linklater

I think you get in trouble if you make experimental big studio films.

- Richard Linklater

Every college player thinks they're on their way. But, delusions aside, I might have toiled in the minor leagues for a bit.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

- Richard Linklater

My dad's chill. He's the guy who, you wreck the car, he says, 'Well, nobody was hurt. It's just some metal.'

- Richard Linklater

I want cinema to be a part of my life. It's natural for me.

- Richard Linklater

Every film's different; every story is so different. But I think I've always been attracted to try to take something minimal and to maximize it cinematically. To find out if I can I really go all the way with one idea.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

The '70s kind of sucked.

- Richard Linklater

The arts were like, there's no opponent. It's just yourself. I'm not saying they don't make the arts a competition with awards and all that, but that's outside the work itself.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

- Richard Linklater

I don't want to be nostalgic for some kind of laid-back Austin where nothing was happening.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

- Richard Linklater

I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.

- Richard Linklater

I'm lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don't even make a big distinction between them.

- Richard Linklater

Artists are great. They jump in.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.

- Richard Linklater

Hollywood has a way of sucking the world's talent to it.

- Richard Linklater

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

- Richard Linklater

I've always been interested in the industrialization of our food; it's been an issue for me from an environmental and animal rights and human health perspective.

- 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.

- Richard Linklater

The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you're still friends with the rest of your life.

- Richard Linklater

I try to avoid bad experiences.

- Richard Linklater

County jail in some ways can be the most dangerous because it's often the least regulated.

- Richard Linklater

I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

I'm interested in people forging their realities.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

I don't see the arts as competitive at all. It was a better angel of my nature. Sports is zero-sum: winner, loser, demonstrable.

- Richard Linklater

Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn't bad. It's a good lesson in human hubris.

- Richard Linklater

There are really smart baseball players. It's a thinking person's game.

- Richard Linklater

You don't really grow up until you quit playing sports.

- Richard Linklater

A lot of Luis Bunuel's later, European films are all great.

- Richard Linklater

Ulrik Ottinger was the most real and experimental of all the German New Wave directors. She was probably the most out-there, too. She's a fascinating artist in that world.

- Richard Linklater

I always say I'll never make a film in Austin in summer, but I always end up here.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

I really do remember everything. I see people I haven't seen in 20 years, and I can talk with them about what we talked about outside the high school.

- Richard Linklater

Took me a long time to know I was a nobody from nowhere.

- Richard Linklater

My plan B has always been to make a film about people who talk a lot.

- Richard Linklater

The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You've got to find it on your own. If you're lucky, you do.

- Richard Linklater

Everyone is encouraged to see their lives, the world through the eyes of the rich.

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

A college athlete is going to be competitive. You don't get to that level if you're not.

- Richard Linklater

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

- Richard Linklater

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.

- Richard Linklater

My working method has always been, 'Work really hard and get it right the first time.'

- Richard Linklater

I loved 'Goodbye to Language.'

- Richard Linklater

Music and smells are the most memory-recall, nostalgia-inducing things.

- Richard Linklater

I like films that just put you in someone's world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you'd care about them.

- Richard Linklater

There are really a lot of dark shadings to a lot of my stuff.

- Richard Linklater

Trump has a lot less than he says he does.

- Richard Linklater

I admire people who can just brazenly go through the world.

- Richard Linklater

I think I got really lucky with Slacker. That was a film that probably shouldn't have been seen.

- Richard Linklater