Top 214 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Redford - Page 4

I didn't think about politics until I came to Europe.

Let's get something straight - I don't see myself as beautiful.

I think you just keep going. I've been that way, my whole life.

I'm always moving forward and trying new things.

[Making Ordinary People] was a wonderful experience. Tremendous. I haven't seen it since. It belongs to the public now; it no longer really belongs to me.

The mainstream usually follows trends, it seldom sets them except for a few films.

So what if my face is falling apart? I don't give a damn. Anyway, it gives me character. Everyone thinks that they can stay pretty forever but some come out of Beverly Hills surgeries looking scary to me.

Right now I am working on something that's pretty important to me. It has to do with my own history in politics. I'd done All the President's Men, and the history of how that came about is a story unto itself. It began with The Candidate. No one knows about that connection. I was on a train, and I was promoting The Candidate going from Jacksonville, Florida, down to Miami to duplicate what candidates in 1972 did.

When I was a kid I was not a good student. I went to the University of Colarado, my grades were poor. I was asked to leave after a year. What I really wanted to do was to be an artist.

In 1973, I was shown a graphic of how dependent the United States was on nonrenewable resources like oil and coal and that little was being done to change that. It seemed irrefutable that we needed a change in direction or we'd be paying a huge price down the road. That's when I made a commitment to become a political activist.

As an artist I just can't think of a better life than the one I've been blessed with. It's just a great ride.

Curiously, directing my own films have made me more tolerant and patient. I've always been an extremely impatient actor. Waiting around drove me nuts. But now I'm much more sympathetic to a director's struggle.

I can't watch completed films - my wife makes fun of me.

Like all actors, I was open to taking on new challenges, including those outside my comfort zone.

Trump is a businessman, but he is such a creature of the entertainment world. It feels that the entertainment industry is more entwined with politics than ever before. I just think he is who he is. You can't blame him for being who he is. He's always been like that. He's our fault - that's how I see it. We let him come to where he is. I'm not so interested in blaming him; that's being done enough by others. I'm more interested in: How did this happen?

I was blessed to look well and retain a youthful look but that was just genes. I was disappointed when critics started pointing out my wrinkles. I thought, you mean this is what it's gonna be about now? I'm not going to be permitted to be human?

Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings a certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.

From my experience in my country, America over and over again takes itself right to the brink, it puts one foot over but it never goes over. It wakes up at the last minute and says woah, and then pulls back...

The art of making a film and its content are far more interesting to me than the result or impact.

You work like hell to get yourself ahead in the business. You could go anywhere before, and suddenly you can't go anywhere. It's like being a cartoon character.

In fact, I think more broadly about what an audience requires, but I want an audience to be fascinated by the process of finding an answer, or finding out there isn't one.

I've always wanted to try new things because it's exciting and it keeps you active and alive.

I enjoyed working with Dustin Hoffman. That was really fun. He decided that to really be effective as Woodward and Bernstein, considering their differences, we should spend some time together. Because Dustin and I were very different.

Television tells us only the things it wants to. It still feeds us heroes, it still offers villains. And even though we know better than to always trust it, we still watch.

I'm not that interested in someone that one-dimensional, but I'm interested in playing somebody that's more complicated.

We've poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We're running out of resources and we are running out of time.

When I was about fifteen, I went to work at Yosemite National Park. It changed me forever. Nature had carved its own sculpture, and I was part of it, not the other way around.

Essentially, my kids grew up with the emphasis on the environment because I became a political activist in about 1969 and it was not an easy time. Those were the days when the oil and gas companies pretty much controlled the show and anybody speaking about solar energy or carbon energy would get smashed down as being a radical or a tree-hugger or what have you. So I was out there feeling very often alone and my kids would get that.

Water is the sleeping giant issue of the 21st century and we all need to wake up about it.

Once you leave Sundance suddenly you run into bulldozers and concrete and cranes, and all that heritage that the Mormon culture used to be so proud of is turned into out of control develpoment.

People are finally able to look around and say, 'I can see the drought, I can see the rising sea levels, I can see the crops dying. Okay, now I get it.' It is finally beginning to sink in that there has been a lot of damage.

I guess the optimistic thing is that those people in Congress who are climate deniers, I think their time has run out.

I look at going to Hollywood as going behind enemy lines. You parachute in, set up the explosion, then fly out before it goes off.

God, I just love baseball.