Top 16 Quotes & Sayings by Hal Hartley

I see (humor) in the smallest things.

9/11 was my first day teaching at Harvard University. My classes were all canceled and I got back to town two days later. I'm one of those people who doesn't think the world has changed any at all since 9/11. It just seemed to be almost inevitable, something like that. That's one of the reasons why the backstory of Fay Grim goes all the way back into the '80s. I was trying to sketch out the continuity of all this hanky-panky between the security agencies of the world.

Everybody's a specialist.

More and more, even with a measure of success, I'm not sure what it is people are seeing when they see a movie I've made.

I'll marry you if you admit that respect, admiration, and trust equals love.

This notion of changing technology interests me. I work on a computer now, and it's not been easy to adjust. I still prefer to have my hands on film when I'm editing.

Though I'm not religious, I am interested in religion. I read a lot of history and I think it came out of that. I just think I couldn't understand certain eras of history without knowing what these people believed in.

TRUST took as its starting point the question, What would happen if a movie took the character of a teen-age girl seriously?.

There's no such thing as adventure. There's no such thing as romance. There's only trouble and desire.

We discover and invent new ways of finding out the same old things.

Perhaps I'm just optimistic.

I think maybe written films are better than real films. You can see them in your head and yet everything is exactly as you want it to be.

I wonder if there is anything to discover.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do things. If you make a chair, you want to make a nice chair. You want people to admire it. I think doing something well is a form of respect for humanity in general. I have found that all incompetence comes from not paying attention, which comes from people doing something that they don't want to do. And doing what you don't want to do means either you have no choice, or you don't think that the moments of your life are worth fighting for.

All the discoveries seem to be discoveries of means.

I'm often uncertain of what's expected of a movie.