Top 90 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Hedges

I make sure when I direct that it's a very joy-based set that hopefully is filled with a lot of respect.

Over the course of my creative life, I've trafficked in broken, heroic mothers.

I'm looking, often, towards younger people, listening to how they're working, at least they're trying, and some of the old greats, too. Just to try to remain relevant and off-balance, but hungry and eager.

Black people are more likely to be incarcerated than white people. That's just a fact and it's regrettable and it's got to change.

Lucas is living the life that I wanted, but I want to be clear, I don't feel there's been any pressure for him to live it.

If you get back into the beginner mindset, you can unearth an energy and a fire that I didn't know I could even still possess.

There's no reason that a writer, if they have some discipline and curiosities and passion, can't be vital for a long, long time.

In my family, if something were to have happened with one of my kids, I think my wife would be the tougher one.

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

When you have an intimate encounter with mortality as my family and I did with my mom's death, I took a long look at my life and I asked myself what was the one thing that I hadn't done that I had really wanted to do. And it was to write and direct a film.

I want to make a series of films of contemporary America that feel urgent and deal with sometimes-topical matters, but hopefully in a universal way.

I've read both books that 'Beautiful Boy' is based on, and I can't wait to see that film. I root for that film.

The most autobiographical thing I've ever written is my second novel, called 'An Ocean in Iowa.' That is pretty close to my childhood.

I love films that take place over a short period of time, and I feel that those films are in our cinematic DNA.

When I did 'Gilbert Grape,' Lasse Hallstrom let me be on the set with him and in the editing room and in the casting sessions and so on. And so I got a firsthand, rather intimate, high-pressure look at how to make a film.

So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.

I wanted to direct long before I'd even written a screenplay.

Something happened to me when I wrote female characters in my early plays; it was a real liberation.

I've always had an acute sense of mortality, maybe because my father's a minister.

My older son works in finance and private equity, which he loves, and Lucas works in film and theater.

Ultimately what I try to do is work on stories I love with people I admire, and sometimes they get made and sometimes they don't.

I feel cool when I say I live in Brooklyn.

I don't know if a mother's love and a father's love is that different.

There are sections of the film that I don't love. There are moments that really lift and elevate, and then there are parts that feel clunkier to me. But the totality of 'Harold and Maude' is so much greater than maybe other films that are more perfect or look more beautiful or handle every moment more exquisitely.

The Orpheus myth is my favorite myth, and the prodigal son is my favorite parable.

I once heard a story, it's probably apocryphal, but I love the notion. That a car had flipped over and the baby was trapped underneath the car and the mother was thrown from the car. Then the mother lifted up the car to pull her child to safety. And I believe that my own strength comes from whom and what I love.

Writing a really good screenplay is not easy. It can be a very punishing form.

There are so many films I lean on and look toward and return to that give me some guidance on how to keep moving in the world, and that's what film does, at its best.

I grew up in a very loving but very broken family, and I suppose that's why I'm drawn to telling stories about well-intentioned people who are doing their best - but are not always successful - in figuring out how to maneuver through this complicated, bumpy and broken world.

I play this game with my son called Never Seen. We try to see new things every day, and we do. I don't take that for granted.

If you wanted John Gielgud to cry, he could say, 'Which eye?'

My mother, Carole Hedges, was my world until she walked out of our house when I was 7. Actually, she didn't walk out. Alcohol walked her out.

When I was a young lad just out of college at the North Carolina School of the Arts, I directed several plays that I wrote. It was essential theater, meaning we had no money, so our set may be six stools and two chairs and eight cream pies.

There was a part of me that wanted to take my place next to, you know, Debra Granik. She's such a hero for me.

Everything good in my life can be traced back to my mother's sobriety. She showed me that broken people can - with the help of others - turn themselves around.

I grew up going to church every Sunday and my mother was a drug and alcohol counselor, so both of my parents' lives have been about helping people at times of crisis.

Well, because my films are really about how people interact with each other, and the complexity, and the nuance, and the surprise of those moments I try to create a safe enough space that allows the actors to operate from their own instincts. My direction is more suggestions, prompts or questions.

The kinds of movies I make are not easy to get made.

The greatest love I believe... the greatest love I have is for my children, but I think the greatest love probably universally is a mother's love for a child.

I never try to think I have the answer to what people should do or not do.

I wouldn't say I'm a religious person, but I am definitely inclined toward asking the big questions.

When I go home to Iowa, people assume I live in this very big anonymous place where no one knows each other or wants to. Truth is, I know my neighbors better in Brooklyn than I ever did in Iowa.

I grew up going to funerals and visiting people in nursing homes. I'm not as afraid of dealing with the dying as maybe some other people may be.

I completely hold on to the idea that people are eager if not desperate to be told a good story.

My mother's sobriety - that's when I found the theater, that's when I moved from being a basketball player to being a musician, to being an actor, to then being a writer.

Harold and Maude' is a film I just keep finding myself rewatching.

I try, in my films, to normalize things that maybe 20 or 30 years ago a film would have been about. 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' needed its own film, but now blended families you see all the time.

Pieces of April' was going to be a 3 to 7 million dollar film and we had three entities, two studios, and one wealthy man and they all backed out. It was quite a blow.

I used to find limitations frustrating, but I find them enormously liberating.

My formative years were all shaped by a mother who was very sad and had a drinking problem, while my father was lonely and angry. He was an Episcopal priest and raised four kids on his own.

I'm interested in stories that help me, people navigate in this broken world.

I think the best dramas are as funny as possible and the best comedies have, underneath them, real substance.

One of the great kicks of having a movie made is that you envision this world.

So, yes, I wrote a script called 'Ben Is Back' that I got to make with a bunch of remarkable artists and craftspeople.

Is my job as a child, even as an adult, is my job to heal the wounds of my parents' childhoods?

If there's a photo of a roomful of kids I'm the one with the biggest smile or my hand over my face.

I'm the lucky father to two young men. When any of your kids, and your parents feel this way about you, clearly, when your kids find what they love to do and they throw themselves into it, and they find joy in the doing of it, and it's actually work that's honorable, and, you know, all of those things, it's a great feeling.

The job in every re-write is to make it harder for your characters to get the thing that they need.

Well, it made perfect sense that I originally wanted to be an actor because every Sunday, we walked into church and we acted like we were the happiest, most together family.

And for better or worse, a story like 'Pieces of April' is the kind of story I'm supposed to tell. The kind of story that makes you laugh as much as possible but also breaks your heart.