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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“I want to make a film about a factory worker.”

“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.”

“I've done my part to 'ruin' Austin.”