Top 252 Westerns Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

It was quite frightening to be asked to write the music of a Western because there are so many things that you can refer to that can be cliche, and that could really poison your mind, from Morricone, to Bernstein, to Neil Young. So much music has been written for Westerns, that you wonder how you're going to find a new or different idea.

If you scroll through all the movies I've worked on, you can understand how I was a specialist in westerns, love stories, political movies, action thrillers, horror movies, and so on. So in other words, I'm no specialist, because I've done everything. I'm a specialist in music.

But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.

I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood, but the Westerns I draw from most directly come from an earlier period in Hollywood. I actually look back at movies like 'Rio Bravo' and others I've liked over the years, and I capture pictures from the movies and use them as a reference for the scenes I create.

[David Milch] had say, "You have to understand that our history of western movies, what we've been doing in westerns since the movies began to talk, you had audiences that would be offended by certain things, and there was a cleaning-up of the way people spoke."

The first thing that pops into my mind when it comes to playing cowboys is my father, Lloyd Bridges. When I was a little kid, I loved to dress up like a cowboy - put on the boots, hat, and walk around. He was in a lot of westerns, and my dad loved to ride.

I figured if I write a modern thriller but spliced in the DNA of a classic western - the drifter who comes into town with secrets - I could do something interesting with both genres. Westerns are also an incarnation of the classic knight errant tale, the lone warrior with a moral code, and I love those types of stories.

I always thought it was a B.S. thing that they didn't show it [scalping] in other Westerns, but especially if you're going to really go with the idea that we're desecrating the bodies, and the idea is to strike fear in the hearts of other German soldiers, then we had to see what they're talking about.

Because all the movies that we tell ourselves we can't make - ballets, westerns, dramas, everything that are the hardest things to make - those are the movies that are not only winning awards which is fantastic, but also those movies that are commercial. We won't see a fascinating season like this for a while.

'3:10 to Yuma' was one that I just kept on talking and thinking about after reading it. And I think the reason is because, like in most Westerns, you have the very clear-cut bad-guy/good-guy, however, as the movie progresses, you kind of see that it's a very fine line that divides these two.

Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.

I was a bouncer when I was in DePaul in Chicago at the theater school. I threw drunks out of bars - unless I had a play running that weekend. But I only had two actual fights. Some were like out of old Westerns.

I had so much fun doing Django, and I love westerns so much that after I taught myself how to make one, it's like, 'OK, now let me make another one now that I know what I'm doing.'

Westerns were always my favorite things when I was little. And it always bothered me when cowboys were too clean in movies, or when they wore their guns like they had an outfit on. It always worked better when a guy looked sweaty and smelly; I hadda believe, I hadda believe that.

In a traditional Western there's always the bravado, and it's almost like they're winking that they know they're in a Western - "Look how good I can spin my gun." In real life, when the bad guy kills somebody, or they're bad guy friend gets killed, they're upset, too, which is not typical in Westerns.

I did 10 years of comedies and 10 years of Westerns. I really like to stay away from car chases. I prefer the more intimate film. You have a much more direct association with the emotions.

I love horses, and I love all of it. The sights and sounds and smells, the whole genre of Westerns - I love them. And I know they're rare for actors to get to do, and they're even more rare for women to get to do, so I really think I was drinking in the experience on so many levels.

In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.

I was writing a film criticism book on Sergio Corbucci, the director who did the original Django. So, I was kind of getting immersed in his world. Towards the end of the Inglourious Basterds press tour I was in Japan. Spaghetti Westerns are really popular there, so I picked up a bunch of soundtracks and spent my day off listening to all these scores. And all of a sudden the opening scene just came to me.

If you talk about genres - I don't care if you're talking about war, Westerns, science fiction, horror, fantasy, humor, romance - anything you can find, strolling the aisles of a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I can bring you many comic books representing each genre.

I loved Westerns for different reasons as an adult. It is not only our only native brand of storytelling - the only one that's not influenced by Europeans and not something that's done better by the French - but I also love the sensuality of the Western. The sights, sounds, and smell of a Western are very exciting.

I was rather shaken by all the green trees. I always am. It gets me. I don't want to be funny about it but I am. I loved seeing all the westerns, but I had asthma and couldn't go anywhere, but I loved watching them in Technicolor and seeing the cowboys and the landscapes of Monument Valley and you'd see the forests of the Anthony Mann films and think, 'wow, that's fantastic', but I could never go there!

Audiences trust Westerns when you hit the right tone. I think they're not in vogue, but they will always be in vogue when you hit the right note.

I watched Westerns from the time I was a girl. My dad was a big Western fan. I always loved Clint Eastwood movies and 'Westworld', where the guy gets trapped in a western-themed amusement park. The western motif was fascinating to me.

I like action films, not exclusively, but I like Samurai films. I like Westerns. Not so much war pictures, but a few. I like kinetic cinema.

Typically, in Westerns, people who are in a Western feel like they're in a Western. It's almost like they know they do all these Western things.

The four movies I can remember seeing as a kid were 'The Elephant Man,' 'The Magnificent Seven,' 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' and 'Mad Max!' Two of those are westerns. So the western genre is emblazoned on my memory from childhood, and those are two great movies.

I was always a fan of the great old spaghetti Westerns, the Sergio Leone films. But the one that always sticks with me, that I just thought was brilliant and perfect is "Cat Ballou." Lee Marvin in "Cat Ballou."

I think you're going to find out that westerns will be coming back. It's Americana, it's part of our history, the cowboy, the cattle drive, the sheriff, the fight for law, order and justice. Justice will always prevail as far as I'm concerned.

I think my mom is the inspiration of me wanting to do film and TV and be an actor because she loved film so much. She loved, like, horror films and action films, so growing up, she loved watching all the Charles Bronson films and all the westerns.

My love of visual sequences stems from live-action films like Sergio Leone westerns, Kurosawa, some '70s action films, Tex Avery, and my general love of animated movement.

I was always the bad guy in westerns. I played more bad guys than you can shake a stick at until I played the Professor. Then I couldn't get a job being a bad guy.

I love researching, whether it's old Western documentaries or old Western country singers or John Ford Westerns, which are heavily influenced by family values, which so many of these country songs are related to.

Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.

I was always raised on cowboy films, and then when I could start making choices about the movies I wanted to watch I found myself wanting to watch gangster films which were slightly more sophisticated than the baseline stuff that was in westerns.

Unless a Western's made money - doesn't matter who made the money, doesn't matter what the subject is - if the last one didn't make any money, you can't make another one for a four-year period. Westerns more than any genre.

I love Westerns and I remember as a kid climbing up on the couch and make it into a saddle and shoot guns and fall off. I would lay there after my death and my mom would tell me to eat lunch and I'd say, 'I'm still dead, Mom!' I was Method, even then.

If one were to go back to the '50s, the most popular TV genre on the air in the United States were Westerns. You could go turn on ABC or CBS on any night and you'd almost have three full hours of everything from 'Bonanza' to 'Rawhide' to 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'

My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.

In the '70s, with movies like 'Little Big Man,' westerns began to have a little different flavor, and I think casting people and filmmakers began to realize, 'Hey, maybe we can get a little more authentic in terms of who we cast here.' That kind of opened up the gates.

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had aquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.

My dad started to watch westerns at dollar cinemas in Seoul and felt like America was a miraculous place. His family had lost a lot of land during the Korean War and the Japanese occupation. That affected him a lot as a kid. He always felt like he needed to come to the U.S. and get land.

Studios, because they are investing a great deal of money in movies, they want a guarantee that when they hire somebody that person can deliver for them. Everything is fear based, so they pigeonhole people. But I've written everything, from Westerns to sci-fi to dramedy, I've done it all.

I watched Westerns from the time I was a girl. My dad was a big Western fan. I always loved Clint Eastwood movies and Westworld, where the guy gets trapped in a western-themed amusement park. The western motif was fascinating to me.

My uncle Randall always had a book in his hand. He read in the car, he read at restaurants, he read when you were talking to him. He read lots of different things, but mostly it was Louis L'Amour's westerns and contemporary thrillers.

I liked doing comedies, but as I got older I was better suited to do Westerns. Because I think it becomes unattractive for an older fellow trying to look young, falling in love with attractive girls in those kinds of situations... Anyway, I always felt so much more comfortable in the Western.

There's a level where the themes of a film are very relevant to me and also the idea of finding out how relevant one genre is to another. I think that westerns and samurai films and superhero films have a lot in common. It's just that the scale of the visuals in tentpole films can sometimes overwhelm the drama.

My parents weren't involved in show business, but my parents would show me. We'd watch old films in the house. Little film festivals of Westerns and stuff like that when I was a kid. I knew I wanted to be those guys in those movies before I knew what being an actor was.

Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it. Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. The only place success comes before work is a dictionary Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Westerns just thematically, as a genre, have kind of a few tent poles that I really admire, and one of them is this perception that life was simpler back then. And with that perception goes that people were good or people were bad. You survived by your strengths or you perished by your weaknesses.

Your basic physical makeup does influence the parts you're offered. If you're big, they cast you either dumb or tough, although there are exceptions. Clint Eastwood and James Arness carved out niches for themselves in Westerns. I just hope I won't be faced with doing 'Li'l Abner' in dinner theater for the rest of my career.

I did a Coca-Cola commercial when I was about two and a half years old, and then me and my family were extras in a bunch of Westerns. I loved dressing up and stepping into this imaginary world, and it was fun to get outside of my tiny little town with a bunch of movie weirdos.

I tend to lean more towards the Westerns of the 40s and 50s as opposed to the 60s and 70s. They get a little too drab for me when you get into the Spaghetti Western era. I love the John Ford movies. I love the music. I love the scope.

When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

I experienced Kabul with my brother the way Amir and Hassan do: long school days in the summer, kite fighting in the winter time, westerns with John Wayne at Cinema Park, big parties at our house in Wazir Akbar Khan, picnics in Paghman.

I always knew I wanted to do a Western. And trying to think of what that would be, I always figured that if I did a Western, it would have a lot of the aesthetics of Spaghetti Westerns, because I really like them.

Mel Brooks is an interesting one because he started out making films about stuff that he was totally affectionate about, like musicals, westerns, horror films, Hitchcock films. And then, as they get further on, and you get to 'Spaceballs,' then it's just kind of contrived.

Even the Westerns that I grew up with, the Sergio Leone's and all that, there was always a sort of anti-hero, a guy reluctant to shame even, to pick up the gun again because he wants to help other people, and he does, he uses his skills for that.

You have to go with your instincts. I remember when I was about to make "Fistful of Dollars" a big article came out that said, "Italian Westerns are finished." I said, "Swell." Then, of course, the film came out, and it did something. I'm so glad for the dozens of times I haven't listened along the way.