“To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.”
“’Easy Rider’ and ‘The Last Movie’ were the only films that I made totally on my own.”
“The new generation doesn’t know anything about me except for what they saw in’ Easy Rider.’”
“Warner Bros. got into television very early, so I did a lot of television there. In the beginning, it was sort of okay to do television. But then it became this thing where movie actors didn’t do television – they certainly didn’t do commercials, because that just meant the end of your career.”
“Independent films in this country are in the same position. Miramax and Fine Line are not independent – they’re with Disney! Come on. Or they’re with Warner Brothers. They’re all with somebody.”
“Work is fun to me. All those years of being an actor and a director and not being able to get a job – two weeks is too long to not know what my next job will be.”
“’Easy Rider’ was never a motorcycle movie to me. A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.”
“I don’t believe in reading. I don’t care about reading. It means nothing to me. I believe that by using your eyes and ears, you’ll find everything that there is, and you don’t have to read about it.”
“Society loves to put bubbles up there and pop them, and I resent it. I’d rather expose myself myself.”
“Two chicks. I mean, ladies… ah – women, girls, whatever the term is. I’ll get it. I’ve got it marked down somewhere.”
“I’m just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City, Kansas. And I always thought that acting was art, writing was art, music was art, painting was art, and I’ve tried to keep that cultural vibe to my life.”
“I changed to Republican when Reagan became president because I wanted to see a change to years of Democrat-run Senate. And I voted Republican until Obama. I think he’s terrific.”
“It’s strange: I always try to do the best acting job I can do under the imaginary circumstances of my working position at any given time. But it’s terrible when you know it’s going bad, and you know it immediately. But you just have to still try to do the best job you can.”
“I don’t enjoy being recognised. It’s unpleasant.”
“My grandparents were from Kentucky – I’m related to Daniel Boone. He was my great-great-great uncle.”
“I decided when I was very young, when I first saw movies, that I wanted to be an actor.”
“In Method acting, you can’t have preconceived ideas. You have to live in the moment. You have to keep yourself open.”
“I made my living as an actor, and I love acting, so I’m an actor. But that gets you in a lot of trouble in the art world.”
“Victoria got very involved with the Obama campaign, and I stepped back out of it. I thought it was good for her to get some glory. It’s hard being married to a celebrity.”
“I think, at one point, I’d been in the five most expensive movies ever made – not that I had large parts in them. ‘Apocalypse Now’ was one.”
“I did a lot of films in Europe, in Spain. I went to Australia and did ‘Mad Dog Morgan’; I did ‘Apocalypse Now’ in the Philippines; I did Wim Wenders’ film ‘The American Friend’ in Germany.”
“When some people were going around being surf bums and tennis bums, I was being a gallery bum. I really liked galleries.”
“I painted from the time I was five years old. I was going to be a painter, an actor, a director, and a writer.”
“I did a video with Mick Jagger down in Rio de Janeiro. But I played a video director, and that’s the closest I’ve gotten to directing, except Bob Dylan came and had a few meetings with me about doing a video for him.”
“I think ‘Easy Rider’ might have been the first time that someone made a film using found music instead of an orchestral score. No one had really used found music in a movie before, except to play on radios or when someone was singing in a scene.”
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