Keith Carradine Quotes

They're such different things [Townies and Lonesome Dove]. I certainly love them both. Certainly Lonesome Dove would be way hard now, because, I mean, back then I wasn't married.

But the West of the old times, with its strong characters, its stern battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, can never be blotted from my mind.

I would have loved to have a role in the HBO series 'Deadwood.' It was Shakespeare in the Old West.

I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened.

If a western is a good western, it gives you a sense of that world and some of the qualities those men had - their comradeship, loyalty, and physical courage.

The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.

Don't ever for a minute make the mistake of looking down your nose at westerns. They're art - the good ones, I mean. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle, and with the basic emotions - love, hate, and anger - thrown in. We'll have westerns films as long as the cameras keep turning. The fascination that the Old West has will never die. And as long as people want to pay money to see me act, I'll keep on making westerns until the day I die.

I've grown up watching a lot of Western genre films on TV, and America is not just a country, but it's one of the most important countries in the world, and examining the process of how this nation came to be, it's an important thing, even for outsiders.

I just remember, all I'm doing is remembering when I was a kid I remember that they used to put out there in the old west, a wanted poster. It said: "Wanted, Dead or Alive." All I want and America wants him brought to justice. That's what we want.

Jesse [James] was known as a kind of Robin Hood character and also it was known that his exploits were somewhat dubious - however, he perpetuated this myth. Our film [The Assassination of Jesse James] really takes place at the end of all that, the last year of his life, at the end of all that celebrity.

Westerns aren't about the gunfight, even though it has to be there at one point. It's not what they're about, at least the good ones. It's about the drama. It's about the resourcefulness of men and women.

It was fortunate for all of us to have Joaquin Jackson, who is a very renowned Texas Ranger, on board. He spent quite a few days with us on set and he added a lot to it for me on what it's like to be a Texas Ranger.

I started these Rush Revere and these children's books, I mean, there was a mission. It was to teach the truth of American history because, ego-wise, I love America. I wish everybody did. And I hope everybody will.

One of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion." And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses."

I always knew I wanted to do a Western. And trying to think of what that would be, I always figured that if I did a Western, it would have a lot of the aesthetics of Spaghetti Westerns, because I really like them.

Trail dust is thicker'n blood.

'Deadwood.' I could have watched that forever.

Believe it or not, when we were first married, our combined monthly student loan bills were actually higher than our mortgage.

Speaking of childhood fantasy, we were doing a Western, but we were also just hanging out. You work, and you ride and ride and ride, and then, for the next two hours, you look for a place to kick out, in this amazing canyon with so much heritage and so much history.

Desperate times call for desperate measures" is an aphorism which here means "sometimes you need to change your facial expression in order to create a workable disguise." The quoting of an aphorism, such as "It takes a village to raise a child," "No news is good news," and "Love conquers all," rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen, which is why we provide our volunteers with a disguise kit in addition to helpful phrases of advice.

Cowboys, just like the word says.

It is clear that the vehicle of the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my ideas.

Move to California - my first impression of the Wild West.

There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular; to look like it is changing the world. I don't care how a building looks if it means something, not to architects, but to the people who use it.