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.

Everyone is encouraged to see their lives, the world through the eyes of the rich.

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?

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

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.

We emphasize negativity and violence in the media because that's what grabs everybody's attention, but in the real world, it's mostly people being very cooperative and caring and connected and kind. That's the norm of human experience. And yet, what gets our attention is the very opposite.

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.

We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.

I always had that long-term vision. Even getting going with cinema, knowing it was such a long road to be able to make films, but I always had a long term. Whenever I was starting out, I had that patience.

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.

I'm lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don't even make a big distinction between them.

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.