Ethan Coen

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

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

“It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.”

“We used to watch the muscle movies on Saturday matinees, such as 'Hercules Unchained.' Then we'd go outside and do a remake of it.”

“We've always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We're actually strangely consistent in that respect.”

“When you're younger, you kind of assume you'll be fine at whatever. Then you get older, and you're either unsuccessful and you wonder why, or you're successful and you wonder why.”

“You don't go around thinking about how characters in a movie, in the stories you make up, relate to people in general.”

“You don't have to have a true story to make a true story movie.”

“It's hard to get away from being old. I still talk about the TV set.”

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

“Is this business any worse than any other business? It's not especially bad.”

“We loved the language in Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country,' which is really about the region, while in 'True Grit' it's more about period: people did speak more formally and floridly.”

“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.”

“Two heads are better than none.”

“People respond to real problems from the heart.”

“There's something strange - not in a bad way - about going back to where you grew up or recreating where you grew up. It's strange and stimulating.”

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

“'The Big Lebowski' was something we wrote for Jeff Bridges, and we set it aside for a couple of years because he wasn't available.”

“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.”

“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.”