Top 191 Quotes & Sayings by Billy Bob Thornton - Page 3

I know that I loved music before I loved movies, simply because I didn't see movies as a kid.

I don't think anybody chooses to be an underdog.

The ones that work out really and ones that become something to the audience, those are the most important people.

People always like stories about the little guy fighting the big guy.

When I was coming up, if you were on a TV show, that meant something was wrong with your career. Now it means something's right with your career.

If you've written it you know exactly; whoever you're playing if you've written it you already know it. As a matter of fact, you've already made the movie if you wrote it. You've made it in your head.

When you're a director, for two years or at least a year and a half, that's what your life is. So if you're gonna do it, you gotta be ready to do it and it has to be something you care about. I've found something that I do care about.

As most characters are that I play, there's a lot of me in it, anyway.

I think my stuff's kind of obsolete now, you know? I'm making Model Ts or something, and everybody else is making spaceships.

I always say if you're going to do a movie about Charles de Gaulle get a Frenchman, you know. I'm not French. And yeah, sure I could get with a dialect coach and work for six months trying to talk like a Frenchman. But there's some French actors. Just get one of them, you know.

I don't know how to type so I handwrite everything.

I'm not a TV junkie outside of sports and history really and stuff like that.

I mean the most important thing you can have as an actor, writer, director, or whatever you are, poet or whatever it is, is life experience. Life experience doesn't mean you have to live 50 years to have it. I mean you know a lot of people have huge life experience by the time they're in college.

I'll always consider myself a Southerner. A lot of people put California down, but my dreams were realized there.

The great movies that I want to do now are being made for $2.5-million budgets.

Normally you're 21 years old and you look like Tom Cruise and you do a couple underwear commercials first and then you're a movie star. That didn't happen for me. So it was all quite overwhelming.

My songs aren't built around choruses or hooks or anything like that. That's kind of how I write screenplays too.

If you want anybody to have a different voice, you really have to visualize and hear the voices of all these people. Sometimes when I write with specific actors in mind, it helps.

Sometimes I have songs born out of stories.

To tell you the truth, I don't ever talk about characters as separate from myself.

If something really strikes a chord with an audience, if it pops on TV, I don't mind watching it for a few minutes.

You have to really know what you're saying.

If you look at a character as a mountain over there that you have to climb, then I think you've lost 50 percent of the air.

Nothing wrong with computer as things. They can work wonders in communications and business and medicine and everything else.

We didn't have a movie theatre until I was about nine, so I just didn't see them. But, once I got into movies I loved them.

We don't shoot in L.A. much anymore. You know, TV and movies, most everything's shot other places.

I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else.

I'm not really a guy who wants to be a director, anyway.

Robert Duvall taught me years ago. He said, "You know theatre is not real. I don't like plays." You know, he doesn't like plays. And I agree with him in certain ways, you know. They can be fun. I don't mind going to see them. I went and saw Phantom of the Opera. I thought hey, that's cool. Look at the mask and all that.

Kids won't watch older movies - they want to see what's hip right now.

I think people can live a religious life and yet believe in things maybe outside the box a little bit.

You never know what an audience is going to think about something. The ones that the audience doesn't get, I tend to let them go. I don't like to dwell on them too much.

A lot of kids, when they go to church, they don't really pay much attention to what they're saying or whatever.

If you're in the heyday of rock and roll and movies, and that's where I grew up. We didn't have to look for it. We didn't have to create angst. We didn't have to create desire. We didn't have to say, see we were screwed, my generation, because we wanted to be The Beatles or Elvis Presley. That ain't going to happen. So we always had this thing to reach for.

When you're a kid, somebody's mid-forties, you think they're an old man. Then you grow up and it's like, I was a kid.

I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.

I always wanted to play a lawyer.

I've led a very eclectic life.

We're not encouraging idols other than on the TV show, you know and that's the wrong way to do it. If we had become famous from a contest show we'd be embarrassed in my generation. But if that's the benchmark then I thought well young people who want to be filmmakers, or musicians, or whatever are screwed. But maybe they're not because what they're doing is they're creating their own thing.

Now, if you want to do realistic, kind of heavier acting stuff, you do it on Amazon or Netflix or whatever or HBO.

Independent films now, they want to give you $2 million to make it, 21 days to shoot it and they want 10 movie stars in it.

People over 40 stay home and watch television, that's why there are no movies out there.

If you're going to take care of your kids and pay for your house and do something good for adults, you have to do something on television now.

So we are headed for a time when there won't be anything but movies that are essentially made like video games, and actors will become obsolete, and then the big stars will be people who live in Brentwood or wherever it is, and they have a show called, I don't know, "Pool Parties of Brentwood" or something like that.

You can get famous for doing something stupid and empty, but you do something stupid and empty and you're already famous, you lose your career.

People's attention spans are a little shorter these days. Same thing with food and movies.

The audience, that's who I care about.

The movies I've made about the South, they were my experience and it's something that I know.

I think everybody's contemplating TV now, because mid-level and high-budget independent films are not being made now.

I always have an idea before we even start the movie because if you hire the wrong person, within a couple of days you're going to know that and you're going to be really panicked.

People want the truth but they only want the truth so they can talk bad about you on the blog or on television. They want you to tell them the truth and it screws everybody.

When people are bothering you constantly when you're trying to do just a simple thing that humans do every day but they won't let you do it without bugging you about it, that was a hard thing. Because I became a movie star overnight. From a working actor and working writer to a movie star.

I used to put that I studied with Stella Adler on my resume. I never met Stella Adler. But if you told a casting director you studied with Stella Adler all the sudden they'd let you in the door.

The thing about a motion picture is that look of film on a big screen takes you into a magical.

When I saw that show Lost I learned something. Other than one sort of big dude if you're in an airplane crash only models survive. So you know sit next to somebody pretty, but anyhow.

Movies now, you can watch a trailer for a movie on TV now and you're not sure if it's a video game or a movie. You have to wait till the end of it to see, oh, I see, those actors are in it, so that one's a movie. Oftentimes, it's based on a video game.

I know it's boring to say this but I always start with the script. I mean if it's well written and it's a character that I haven't necessarily played before.

I've watched other directors as an actor and I picked up little things here and there about cameras, [but] I wouldn't consider myself the guy you'd want to hire to do Star Trek.

Everything is very convenient now and it would be real nice if somehow people started going back to the movie theater. And it's people of my generation. It's their fault in a lot of ways, people over 40. It's their fault that the only movies are about robots and beautiful vampires. It's wild, all vampires are beautiful.

Reality shows are usually created by people doing and saying stupid things.