'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.

Richard Linklater

The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you're still friends with the rest of your life.

Richard Linklater

Life Your You

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.

Richard Linklater

Home Car Way

Every day's a hustle.

Richard Linklater

Very Us T

My dad's chill. He's the guy who, you wreck the car, he says, 'Well, nobody was hurt. It's just some metal.'

Richard Linklater

Car You Wreck

As a little kid, you go where your parents drag you. You have no agency, no dominion.

Richard Linklater

Age Your You

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.

Richard Linklater

Experience You World

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.

Richard Linklater

Life Art Your

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

Richard Linklater

Alone Year Thing

Trump has a lot less than he says he does.

Richard Linklater

Trump Than T

Ulrik Ottinger was the most real and experimental of all the German New Wave directors. She was probably the most out-there, too. She's a fascinating artist in that world.

Richard Linklater

Men Art World

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.

Richard Linklater

Work Food Yin

I really do remember everything. I see people I haven't seen in 20 years, and I can talk with them about what we talked about outside the high school.

Richard Linklater

Years Year Wit

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.

Richard Linklater

Car You Would

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.

Richard Linklater

Movies Men Yin

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

Richard Linklater

Use Us Uncomfortable

I remember when I made 'A Scanner Darkly,' going, 'I hope people see it in theater - but I think it's going to be seen in someone's room at two in the morning.' It's that kind of movie. And I would have loved if it had been available on multiple formats at the moment it opened.

Richard Linklater

Morning Mom Men

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.

Richard Linklater

Politics Nature West

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

Richard Linklater

You Whatever Want

When I saw 'subUrbia' on stage, I started having those feelings inside me. I saw it as a film, and I felt I knew the characters, or I was the characters. It really dredged up all this stuff in me that never went away.

Richard Linklater

Art Age Way

If you want to just make a good movie, if you don't enjoy every step and become a master of each little moment, then you shouldn't be doing it.

Richard Linklater

Mom Men Good

The arts were like, there's no opponent. It's just yourself. I'm not saying they don't make the arts a competition with awards and all that, but that's outside the work itself.

Richard Linklater

I think people forget how radical the narrative of 'Slacker' is. There's no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.

Richard Linklater

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.

Richard Linklater

I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American.

Richard Linklater

Some films really do take years to get going, but I'd say that most of the films I want to do are slightly smaller projects. Some could be sketches. They're not all oil paintings.

Richard Linklater

The truth will only be told over a career.

Richard Linklater

I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.

Richard Linklater

A college athlete is going to be competitive. You don't get to that level if you're not.

Richard Linklater

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

Richard Linklater

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

Richard Linklater

I look up and go, 'I'm living in the world I visualized a long time ago.' From making movies, to the Film Society, to just being in a film world. It's a life that I wanted to inhabit. I think everyone has the opportunity to do that in this world - it's just, are you gonna work for it, and how much does it mean to you?

Richard Linklater

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

Richard Linklater

Artists are great. They jump in.

Richard Linklater

I was dating girls who were actresses, and that was fun, so I took a playwriting class. But that was short-lived. That was one year. Around that time, I was seeing movies that were making me think in terms of images.

Richard Linklater

I realized a long time ago that, even as a kid, it's all about the choices you make, the things you pursue. In the end, you're a sum of your choices.

Richard Linklater

You're always just trying to make your film, tell the story you're trying to tell - best you can, you know.

Richard Linklater

I always say I'll never make a film in Austin in summer, but I always end up here.

Richard Linklater

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.

Richard Linklater

One minute you're starting left fielder, hitting home runs; the next, it's career over. I was 20.

Richard Linklater

I always thought that I had a pretty diverse body of work, I mean, as far as subject matter. Teenage rock and roll movie; romance; '20s Western. On paper it looks different, but then there's similarities in the vibe of them.

Richard Linklater

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.

Richard Linklater

I want cinema to be a part of my life. It's natural for me.

Richard Linklater

If you make a film about childhood, you've got to pick a moment - you know, 'The 400 Blows.'

Richard Linklater

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

Richard Linklater

There are really a lot of dark shadings to a lot of my stuff.

Richard Linklater

There are really smart baseball players. It's a thinking person's game.

Richard Linklater

I worked offshore as an oil worker for a couple of years.

Richard Linklater

Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn't bad. It's a good lesson in human hubris.

Richard Linklater

'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.

Richard Linklater

I remember playing for coaches who seemed like military-type guys. It always rubbed me the wrong way.

Richard Linklater