123 Quotes by Ken Loach

What strikes me - we're apparently at the mercy of an economic system that will never work and the big question is, how do we change it, not how do we put up with it.

If all political parties are committed to the role of the free market, the politicians act as, I don't know, as traffic policemen; they stand outside the ring and let the real decisions be slugged out by entrepreneurs. That doesn't seem to me a proper democracy.

I think that's one of the things that sport teaches you. You are only as good as the team around you.

It's what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It's characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it's OK to do that.

I think cinema is taken a bit more seriously in France.

Jimmy's Hall' is set in Ireland in the '30s and everything that went under the camera we had to generate.

Often people write stories about people who are suffering, and they're miserable all the time. That's not the case. You go to the food bank or wherever and there's laughter, there's comedy, there's stupidity, there's silliness and warmth. And that's the reality of people's lives. If you cut out that sense of humor and warmth, you miss the point.

It seems to me the big weakness in most films is the writing. You can learn directing, but you can't learn writing.

I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.