A biography for Richard Linklaterhasn’t been written yet.
“Every college player thinks they're on their way. But, delusions aside, I might have toiled in the minor leagues for a bit.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“'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.”
“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.”
“As a little kid, you go where your parents drag you. You have no agency, no dominion.”
“One minute you're starting left fielder, hitting home runs; the next, it's career over. I was 20.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.”
“You learn from everybody.”
“I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I'm a huge Nagisa Oshima fan. He was one of the most radical Japanese directors to come up in the '60s.”
“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.”
“Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn't bad. It's a good lesson in human hubris.”