Ethan Coen

“We haven't had to defend anything to anybody.”

“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.”

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

“It's more interesting for me as an audience member to see a movie about a loser.”

“We do worry that we might be making something we've made before. It's important that we make something we've never made before.”

“Oscars just ain't gonna do it for me anymore. I need the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oscars have worn off, man.”

“Midwestern Jews is a different community, is a different thing than New York Jews, L.A. Jews. It's just different. It's the whole Midwestern thing.”

“Dave Van Ronk, for those who don't know him - probably most don't know - was a folk singer. He's kind of the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up.”

“People are always curious about brothers working together.”

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

“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.”

“Sometimes you can just hear the actor in the language.”

“That's interesting: people deriving their identities from their music.”

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

“We're not big on taste. And actually, if you don't pander to undue sensitivities, then it ends up usually not being much of a problem.”

“I don't know we have a method. We show up at the office. Is that a method? That's about the extent to which it's been formalized, asystematised. We show up at the office and talk, talk a scene through.”

“There is some pleasure in doing a movie and problem solving on a specific movie and getting a movie made, but once they are done, we don't look at them again, much less relate one to another.”

“Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure. He's the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked.”

“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?”

“Mainstream movies used to be more adventurous because people went to them.”