Quotes by Ethan Hawke

“If my kids are doing well, then my life is going pretty well. And if my kids aren't doing well, it doesn't matter how the other elements of my life are. It's kind of amazing to have a context like that. This is really wonderful.”

“In New York, you've got Donald Trump, Woody Allen, a crack addict and a regular Joe, and they're all on the same subway car.”

“It was never in my dreams to make my personal life anybody else's business.”

“At every turn, when humanity is asked the question, 'Do you want temporary economic gain or long-term environmental loss, which one do you prefer,' we invariably choose the money.”

“I've had a lot of experience in independent film, and about how to choose. You've got to be very discerning about where you put your five bucks, and where you cut and what you don't cut.”

“The biggest problem in my life is trying to be the kind of man that I want to be, the father that I want to be, and how to process the failure of my marriage.”

“I'd be lying if I said I had confidence in every choice I've made, that I have faith in every film I do on every shot.”

“I met a lot of famous people when I was about 24. And none of them seemed very appealing. And so I didn't know why I would struggle to be that kind of person.”

“I think that as soon as you think of yourself as a famous person or anything like that, you're objectifying yourself in some weird way.”

“We live in a funny time. If you don't go corporate, you can't compete. You're relegated as irrelevant. People used to admire that.”

“I always felt that a marriage works best at a farm... where you're together and everybody has clear-cut roles they have chores, 'you take care of this' and you know. But it's hard.”

“I remember being a kid and sleeping over at my friend's house and staying up late and watching 'Nosferatu.' Vampire movies are supposed to be secret and bad. They should be rated R.”

“It's difficult to do a genre film well, and it doesn't matter if you're talking vampire movies or 'Dawn of the Dead' or 'The Thing' or 'Escape From New York.' Those kind of movies, they understand what the old-school B-movie is supposed to be, they get the throwback of it.”

“If I do three movies in a year, I don't feel like acting ever again.”

“Right now, if you're interested in being a dramatic actor, they're not making that many just regular dramas. Movies have to have some other thing going on.”

“I don't know what has happened to movies, but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long. It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic - a movie about Gandhi something with very important subject matters.”

“If you're not a real chameleon of an actor and if you're not one of those guys who can really shape-change themselves all the time, one of the ways to keep pushing yourself and keep changing is to be in different kinds of movies.”

“My relationship to reality has been so utterly skewed for so long that I don't even notice it any more. It's just my reality.”

“I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi.”

“In all of our society, but especially in Hollywood, there is an obsession with perfection that can lead to self-loathing and neurosis and all that kind of stuff.”

Click here to go back to main page.

Learn more about Ethan Hawke.