Richard Linklater Quotes

It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about - bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man - while voraciously reading novels.

After 'Crocodile Dundee,' I turned down lots of stuff, most of it where I'd play the girlfriend of some funny man.

Well, I'm about to do another western, a pilot for HBO this fall.

I think the kick to doing comedy is just to get in a film with really funny people and let them do their jobs. I find that in most comedies, I'm not the funny one, which works out great.

Movies require a lot of patience. I like instant results. If I have done something that's not funny at all, the audience will let me know in two seconds. With the movie, I will have to wait nine months to know if I was that bad.

I'm just ah, actually developing a tv show for HBO, and I'm directing a film this summer, and actually I'm doing some live shows out in western Canada.

In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you're not paid a lot as an actor.

There are a couple of ideas for features that I would love to do. They happen to be comedies.

Most of the stuff I've written has never even gotten made. It's par for the course. It's a great living, but it also gets very frustrating.

My father was a member of the Teamsters Union in California, where he helped to organize better health care for workers. My mother worked for more than 20 years on an assembly line.

I do smaller films, I'm not getting big paydays. I feel like we're just kind of scraping together here.

Doing comedy for film is always a challenge because you are in the hands of the editor after the fact. I am hoping I can do some more soon, I enjoy doing comedy.

I was in a sketch group in L.A., and we were playing, like, backyards in Glendale and stuff. It was pretty ugly because we didn't have any money.

I've received some English-speaking scripts, but I was not interested in them.

I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.

I would really like to do a really cool one-hour show, maybe on, like, HBO or something like that; or something that I've spent a couple of years developing so it would be exactly the character and exactly in with a huge push behind it; or I would maybe want to do a sitcom; something light and funny.

It's still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day.

I'd really been wanting to do a television series. I was looking for a comedy.

There can be no distress, there can be no hard times, when labor is well paid. The man who raises his hand against the progress of the workingman raises his hand against prosperity.

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul....

I am always astonished that conservatives want to save money by paying workers less—driving down the wages of working people.

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth, it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

Ten cents a day is adequate pay for a workingman.