Top 120 Quotes & Sayings by Noah Baumbach - Page 2

As a kid, I thought of myself as a funny person who secretly wanted to be serious, but now I think maybe I'm a serious person who secretly wants to be funny.

I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we're shooting, and that's always a challenge because, unfortunately, people on the street don't know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.

I watch movies all the time, so it's hard to pick certain specific directors that have inspired me in the aggregate.

Many of the crew members I work with and continue to work with were friends or have become close friends, and so we keep working together. And I like casting friends of mine or people I know in parts I know would be perfect for them. I like to bring things and people that mean something to me in to my work.

Being funny, in some ways, is about being connected to psychology.

I've had great experiences or joyful experiences making a movie that people found very disturbing.

I love black-and-white movies that are about contemporary subjects.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

I like the way corduroys feel. I like the sort of jean aspect of corduroys, but also the texture of them. They probably remind me of my childhood, too, I think. I wore cords, and my dad had a corduroy jacket.

I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.

Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.

'Frances Ha' is the closest final product to what I had in my head of any movie I've made. I'm not entirely even sure why that is.

I can feel pretty critical of people, and I understand that sort of feeling of when you're going through something that's painful, taking it out on the world and projecting onto other people, finding faults with other people because it's harder to find faults in yourself.

When you find yourself on the Internet when you're supposed to be writing, you've already lost. It's even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet.

It's going to start really interfering with your quality of life, your health, if you don't adjust to life as it's happening to you.

The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.

I think I've always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.

I'm a huge proponent of therapy and analysis, but it's something that, in a nonprofessional way, can be abused.

Wes Anderson's films, 6-year-olds are crazy about them.

I'm sure I've said some pretty bad pick-up lines.

I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.

I know people who are incredibly successful who still dress the way they did when they were 18, just because they still think that's how they look good.

Dance is a profession with an expiration date for many people.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

Peter Bogdanovich is a good friend.

I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.

It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum.

A lot of black-and-white films generally have a color version that will be used for TV.

I didn't train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.

I was late to the Knicks. My dad was a big fan. But I first started watching baseball; I became a Red Sox fan. My dad was a Mets fan. I wanted to have my own team and league.

I like shooting in New York because I have such a connection to the city. I have so many memories there.

I do like having books on my shelves. I do value that life.

Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.

We all have these notions of cool that come about at different points in our lives, and it's interesting in how it evolves or doesn't evolve in different people.

I'm always looking for overlooked post-Dylan singer-songwriter records from the '70s.

I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford's 'Good Solider' or something I wasn't equipped to understand.

I always viewed life as material for a movie.

I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.

It's nice being friends over a period of time with people whose music you like so much, or other filmmakers, seeing people change, go through trials

I guess I probably took New York for granted. Growing up, playing in the street, going down to the Avenue to the record store and to the grocery store and stuff like that.

I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.

There are days when you're in a good groove and the actor really understands the part and comes as prepared every day as you are and is so inside it. And then there's the day where, for whatever reason, it's just a harder slog. And I feel like those are the days where all the preparation and everything becomes more necessary because you have to find a third route there.

I used a video camera, and shot on film cameras at school and stuff, but I had a lot more training as a writer. I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.

When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

I like to have memories of a place. It brings something extra. I'm not even sure what it is. I mean, it's the same part of it as I like using friends in small parts or people I know or my doorman.

I realize how much I rely on the actors to really know the lines because I tend to forget what they are exactly, even though I've written them. I don't have them memorized. But when it's going well, there is that point where the actor starts to know more about the character than I do.

I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.

It's kind of a crazy art form, movies, in that you have to get it right the day you do it, generally.

I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we're shooting, and that's always a challenge because unfortunately people on the street don't know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.

Nothing that I've turned down do I feel like I should have done. Because I've generated everything I've done, I've never really considered doing something that I haven't originated myself. There are definitely things that I've been brought that someone else made good movies out of. But it's not a path I've followed, so I don't have regret.

I try to write 'and it's all very funny' after each scene description so that the reader can imagine the movie in their head.

If you don't feel good about something, you don't shake it off easily.

I live in Manhattan now, because, in a way, it was my fantasy.

Music is like color or acting or whatever. It's really something I think about from the beginning. Not that I always know exactly what I'm going to use, but I don't see it as something like, "Let's find some songs now!" after we have a finished film.

I really like my first movie a lot, "Kicking and Screaming." I think it's a - I'm very pleased and proud of that movie, but it wasn't the - it wasn't "Citizen Kane" right out of the box, you know? It wasn't "Sex, Lies and Videotape."

When I meet certain filmmakers, sometimes you sit down and you do have some kind of shorthand. It can be fun to see them as someone who has been through similar experiences, but also as someone who just loves film. You can talk with them about films in a way that feels really free.

I like to try to keep things as relaxed and easy as possible. I mean, movies generally attract a lot of people who like to cause fires, so they can later try to put them out. But I don't like that kind of thing.

I do think it's a very good way to describe what a great actor does. You're both acknowledging the authority of the director and the necessity of the actor to push back and find their own voice.

[Shwing] the really naked stuff I've dealt with in my own life, my own therapy and relationships - for me it just feels like a film I'm really proud of.

I like having associations with locations beyond their meaning for the specific movie.