Peter Hedges

“In my family, if something were to have happened with one of my kids, I think my wife would be the tougher one.”

“I play this game with my son called Never Seen. We try to see new things every day, and we do. I don't take that for granted.”

“If you get back into the beginner mindset, you can unearth an energy and a fire that I didn't know I could even still possess.”

“New York just feels real to me, and not everyone is in the movie business.”

“I love films that take place over a short period of time, and I feel that those films are in our cinematic DNA.”

“She doesn't acknowledge Tucker, and there's no thank you for the cigarettes. She says a person shows their gratitude by action, not by words. So I guess that means she thanks me by smoking every cigarette in every pack.”

“I've always had an acute sense of mortality, maybe because my father's a minister.”

“So much of life's dramas, good and bad, play out against family and so it's really inspiring for any number of stories in all the fields I write in.”

“I can go years without going to Los Angeles, but I think my living in Brooklyn is critical to my continuing to have a fairly happy life in the film industry.”

“I stared at her - unable to accept that at one time I was growing inside her. I was once just a couple of cells. My father and my mother were naked something had to be satisfactory about it, because he came inside her and she got pregnant. She, like me, was once a baby in her mother's stomach and so on and so forth and so it goes. So it goes.”

“There's no reason that a writer, if they have some discipline and curiosities and passion, can't be vital for a long, long time.”

“There are very few topics where I can imagine that you might not find humor. And I was stunned at how much weird and dark humor there was when my mom died.”

“I grew up going to church every Sunday and my mother was a drug and alcohol counselor, so both of my parents' lives have been about helping people at times of crisis.”

“Maudlin scenes where people pour their heart out to one another? I don't want to see it.”

“If you wanted John Gielgud to cry, he could say, 'Which eye?'”

“When I did 'Gilbert Grape,' Lasse Hallstrom let me be on the set with him and in the editing room and in the casting sessions and so on. And so I got a firsthand, rather intimate, high-pressure look at how to make a film.”

“There was a part of me that wanted to take my place next to, you know, Debra Granik. She's such a hero for me.”

“Gilbert?"Some days I hate all those who know my name.”

“Harold and Maude' is a film I just keep finding myself rewatching.”

“I'm the lucky father to two young men. When any of your kids, and your parents feel this way about you, clearly, when your kids find what they love to do and they throw themselves into it, and they find joy in the doing of it, and it's actually work that's honorable, and, you know, all of those things, it's a great feeling.”