Ron Howard

“I just don't think of myself as an actor much at all, so I don't lust after any particular roles.”

“A long time ago, I stopped trying to look at projects as genre exercises.”

“Early on in my career, when I had basically been a sitcom actor for all of these years, and I made my first movies, and they were comedies, and they were successes, it was very important for me to stretch, and 'Parenthood' was one of those films. Even though it was a comedy, there was a great deal of authentic drama in the piece as well.”

“I'm lucky in a lot of ways. And in my family life, my home life, is where I count myself the luckiest.”

“I'm not a caterer. I just have to stay with my creative convictions. At some point, you have to just get past the special-interest groups and do what you're there to do, which is make a movie.”

“I'm not really a sequel guy. I did 'Angels & Demons' after 'The Da Vinci Code,' because I like working with Hanks, and I felt it was a really different sort of world that we were visiting. That was, of itself, interesting.”

“It's hard to define change in oneself unless something really dramatic happens, like you give up some vice, fall in love, or something like that.”

“I think it gets overused and tossed around in ways that aren't true. Every impressive achievement is not genius.”

“Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's part of what sucks us into a movie.”

“My folks met at the University of Oklahoma, in the theater department in the 1940s. They were married touring the country in 'Cinderella' and 'Snow White.' My mother was married in Cinderella's costume; the dwarves were the best men.”

“The hardest thing which I've experienced is calling up my father, Rance Howard, who's a wonderful actor, and telling him I've had to cut him out of the movie, which I've had to do twice. That's a lump-in-the-throat phone call.”

“I developed a theory that, in many ways, the early 'Andy Griffith' episodes especially were an awful lot like a Capra movie. They were a lot like 'Mr. Deeds' or a lot like 'It's a Wonderful Life' in tone and presentation.”

“For my 10th birthday, what I wanted was Beatle boots and a Beatle wig. My parents couldn't find Beatle boots, but down at the dime store, Woolworths or someplace, they found a Beatle wig!”

“I like to make all kinds of shows and films, whether it's fantasy or big-popcorn, big-screen escapism or dramas based on real events.”

“I've been around the 'Star Wars' universe from the beginning.”

“Nobody can compare themselves to what The Beatles went through. It was wild.”

“Why fight technology at all? The audience is always going to tell you what they like best. And you, as a storyteller, as a communicator, are going to be required to adjust to that.”

“Richard Dreyfuss, when we were doing 'American Graffiti,' was pumping me to vote for McGovern. But I think I wound up going for Nixon. I thought he could get us out of the Vietnam War quickly. Ha.”

“I didn't really listen to music when I was doing homework or when I - when I work on a script. I tend to drift to NPR and news.”

“When you're young and you're striving, it's all uphill, and it's easier to climb. Then, when you get and look around, you sort of say, 'Wow, the altitude's kinda thin up here!'”