Cowboy Mythology Quotes

You don't just have to see superhero movies. Ultimately, those movies are westerns - superheroes are good guys fighting bad guys in a landscape. In westerns, that divide couldn't be any more clear, but the only superpower you have is that you're a quicker shot than the other guy.

Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, John Wayne - these men had the code of the West.

A lot of old guys in movies are like cowboys - they talk like cowboys and they dress like cowboys.

The political construct that idealized cowboys fell into disrepute during and immediately after the New Deal. In those years, Americans turned away from Western individualism and toward the idea of an activist government.

The reason I wouldn't dare to write a Western is simply because that seems to be so much a part of American culture. Maybe if I want to write a Western enough I should try to overcome that fear, but I'll certainly feel like I'm trespassing. I feel that that is so much a part of American foundation myth, it's part of the myth of America, the American vision of what America is, which people have glorified and then challenged and then vilified.

I was a fan of westerns growing up. Every boy wanted to ride a horse and be a cowboy.

I grew up in wide-open spaces, but they didn't have the romantic history of the West.

I want to return to the epic idea of the grand, big Western, in the sense that 'The Searchers' was.