100 Quotes by John Sayles

If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.

I see very small movies being financed by crowdfunding. If you're a well-known actor or celebrity of some sort, you can probably raise between one and two million. I don't have that kind of cult [following].

My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.

The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you're playing a character who changes within the movie, you've got to do that, but you've got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that's really, really tough.

I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'.

There are very few distributors left to do off-Hollywood movies, and those distributors generally have got thousands of movies to choose from. So you're pretty lucky if you get one to even take your movie and it's pretty rare that they pay anything upfront.

I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.

I take more jobs when I need more money, if I'm investing in films. I take fewer when I don't. Or if something really good comes along, I usually find a way to do a good job on it in the time that I've got.

I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.