Westerns Quotes

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. ~ Clint Eastwood

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. ~ Alexander Payne

We're not nearly as violent as the westerns. ~ Moe Howard

I would love to do a Western again if Westerns came back into fashion. ~ Bruce Boxleitner

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. ~ Berenice Bejo

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. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

Spaghetti Westerns are really brutal and operatic with a surreal quality to the violence. ~ Quentin Tarantino

The Wild West didn't have much in the way of forensics; when you saw the bullet hole you'd say, 'That's prob'ly what kilt 'im. ~ P.K. Vandcast

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. ~ Antoine Fuqua

If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit. ~ Terry Pratchett

Westerns. A period gone by, the pioneer, the loner operating by himself, without benefit of society. It usually has something to do with some sort of vengeance; he takes care of the vengeance himself, doesn't call the police. Like Robin Hood. It's the last masculine frontier. Romantic myth. I guess, though it's hard to think about anything romantic today. In a Western you can think, Jesus, there was a time when man was alone, on horseback, out there where man hasn't spoiled the land yet. ~ Clint Eastwood

I wrote 'The Searcher' because I love westerns, and they've fallen out of fashion. ~ Simon Toyne

My parents were huge fans of westerns, European cinema, and horror in particular. They wouldn't just show me kids' films. ~ Hideo Kojima

It's been fifteen years since I've killed a man. At least a man against whom I held a grudge. ~ L.J. Martin

Sci-fi films are as dead as westerns. ~ Ridley Scott

Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: 'He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones. ~ Martin Amis

There was that last blast of Westerns that came out in the Seventies, those Vietnam/Watergate Westerns where everything was about demystification. And I like that about those movies. ~ Quentin Tarantino

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.' ~ Quentin Tarantino

The only thing I've kind of missed is finding a really good western that I want to do, because I watched westerns a lot. ~ Samuel L. Jackson

My stories may seem to be the stories of men, but a check of my books will show that I have probably written the stories of more strong women than any other writer ... [examples include] Miss Nesselrode of The Lonesome Gods, Ruth Macken of Bendigo Shafter, Echo Sackett of Ride the River, Em Talon of Ride the Dark Trail are some ... [and] one of my favorites is Miss Jessica Trescott of Matagorda. (The Sackett Companion) ~ Louis L'Amour

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. ~ Kevin Costner

Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns. ~ Quentin Tarantino

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. ~ Michael Keaton

father loved to watch old westerns and the evening news, ~ Nicholas Sparks

Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books. ~ Roberto Bolano

I never dreamed I would do Westerns. ~ Eli Wallach

I can't go to bed with John Wayne, so I do the next best thing: I go to bed with my girlfriend, who once met the great man. That's how much I love westerns. ~ Clive Sinclair

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." ~ Johnny Depp

Westerns are very difficult to predict whether they'll reach an audience or not. ~ Barry Pepper

If you look at the great Westerns, and at Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, they all contain elements in common: a harsh landscape; demons or outlaws trying to stop or kill the protagonist; and there are mythical legends at their core, innate in all cultures. ~ Simon Toyne

By the end of the 50s, everything began to collapse and, little by little, I lost all of my work. I lost Rex, the Wonder Dog and all the westerns. ~ Gil Kane

Westerns are fun. I wish more of them would be made. When you're out there on a set, carrying a gun, riding a horse, you kind of get lost in that make believe world. ~ Ricky Schroder

His Charles Bronson-like demeanour together with his Clint Eastwood stare and his John Wayne swagger, created from a diet of westerns and Eighties TV mixed with a lifetime of planning, organising, managing, and leading, were now gelled together with the battle-hardened soldier he had become. ~ Connor Fitzgerald

Westerns were all daddy liked to watch. Give me some Clint Eastwood, some Charles Bronson, and I was a happy girl. It was our father-daughter bonding. ~ Melissa Marr

Milch had a bigger cast, a bigger set (on the Melody Ranch studio, where Gene Autry had filmed very different Westerns decades earlier), and more creative freedom than he'd ever had before. There were no advertisers to answer to, and HBO was far more hands-off than the executives at NBC or ABC had been. And as a result, there was even less pretense of planning than there had been on NYPD Blue, and more improvisation. There were scripts for the first four episodes of Season 1, and after that, most of the series was written on the fly, with the cast and crew often not learning what they would be doing until the day before (if that). As Jody Worth recalls, the Deadwood writers would gather each morning for a long conversation: "We would talk about where we were going in the episode, and a lot of talk that had nothing to do with anything, a lot of Professor Milch talk, all over the map talk, which I enjoyed." Out of those daily conversations came the decisions on what scenes to write that day, to be filmed the day after. There was no system to it, no order, and the actors would be given scenes completely out of context from the rest of the episode. ~ Alan Sepinwall

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'. ~ Stephen Fry

I'm a big fan of period pieces, and I'm a big fan of the old-time westerns. ~ Giancarlo Esposito

When I was a little kid, my parents would show me Marx Brothers' films and westerns and stuff like that. That's where all my desire to be an actor comes from and probably most of my understanding of acting comes from for sure. ~ Alden Ehrenreich

I love westerns. John Ford is one of the 10 best directors. ~ Winona Ryder

I really liked the Mariachi singing in Westerns. ~ Harry Dean Stanton

In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories . . . your science fiction stories . . . your Westerns . . . your fairy tales. Get it?" "Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?" "I guess that's close enough," Susannah said. "Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked. ~ Stephen King

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. ~ Seth MacFarlane

Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited?

Norman Spinrad: I think it's a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov's, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn't. The supposed dichotomy between "literary fiction" and "popular fiction" is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn't want to be "popular," meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were "serious"?

I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. "Genre," if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. "Westerns" must be set in the Old West. "Mysteries" must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. "Nurse Novels" must have a nurse. And so forth.

In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are "genres." They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of "genre" in an absolute literary sense. ~ Norman Spinrad

One of my favorites of all time was with Jim Jarmusch, called 'Dead Man.' I was in that with Johnny Depp. I ride really well, and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked. ~ Lance Henriksen

That era provided a profusion of wonderful actors and actresses to admire - and not always the ones remembered by posterity. Take Joel McCrea, for instance, a real cowboy and a good actor who could excel in westerns like Union Pacific or The Virginian, but who was also wonderful in comedies like The Palm Beach Story for Preston Sturges - and comedy is the hardest thing an actor can do. ~ Robert Wagner

I initially studied literature [in France], and then I went to cinema school. I discovered the Cinematheque, and saw not only action movies and westerns, but also lots of serious movies. ~ Costa-Gavras

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. ~ Elmer Bernstein

I stared at him for a moment, sifting through everything he'd just said and trying to find an appropriate response, but the only thing I could think of was, "Westerns?" "Really? That's all you got?" "Are you sixty-five?" "Shut the fuck up. ~ Nicole Jacquelyn

I grew up loving the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns. ~ Ben Mendelsohn

But of course the Western changed along with America's view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody's free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America's just too fucking confused, can't figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder ... ~ Steve Erickson

I am not a fan of westerns particularly. ~ Patrice Leconte

Riding a bull must be a bit like flying an ultralight. You get up there and have an exhilarating ride, but then you still have to get down. ~ Susan Spence

I would very much like to make Westerns. I love Westerns. I've worked on many Westerns in my youth, in Spain and here, and I love working on them. ~ John Landis

I love westerns. I've always wanted to do a western. ~ Patrick Warburton

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. ~ Sergio Aragones

When I was growing up in the '60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever. ~ Joe Dante

Nothing ever changes as far as Westerns are concerned. They are the same today as they were years ago. ~ Glenn Ford

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. ~ Joel McCrea

I started out as a very young girl in Hollywood doing westerns portraying a mother with a couple of kids. ~ Dorothy Malone

The copycat effects of media violence, similar to those previously attributed to westerns, radio serials and comic books, are easy to exaggerate. ~ Hugh Mackay

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. ~ Mary Steenburgen

I made over forty Westerns. I used to lie awake nights trying to think up new ways of getting on and off a horse. ~ William Wyler

But, you know there's a lot of westerns - not that they were bad - it's just that they can be remade because they're great stories that aren't indelible in an audience's mind when it comes to both the cast and the story. ~ Tom Selleck

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. It's the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns had to our parents' generations, left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films. ~ J.J. Abrams

People love westerns worldwide. There's something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It's a simpler time. There's no organized laws and stuff. ~ Clint Eastwood

In Westerns you were permitted to kiss your horse but never your girl. ~ Gary Cooper

In all good westerns, the good guy is always a little bit questionable because he kind-of has to make moral judgments. ~ Daniel Craig

I've always been a fan of Westerns, but my favorite kind of Westerns mostly were Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, and they mainly took place in the West that was changing. ~ Roger Deakins

How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration) ~ John Steinbeck

Little by little, the look of the land changes by the men we admire. ~ Larry McMurtry

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. ~ Quentin Tarantino

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. ~ Kiefer Sutherland

It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away. ~ John Edward Williams

Comedy, drama, Westerns, sci-fi ... it's all fine if the story's compelling and the character is interesting to me. I do like action a lot. ~ Jensen Ackles

As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win - or just not be so sad! ~ Kara Walker

Universities are the most anti-Israel mainstream institutions in America. And Westerns journalists nearly always use militant or gunman to describe Islamist terrorists. For Reuters, BBC, the Associated Press, CNN, and nearly all newspapers, it violates moral neutrality to label even a man attempting to smash a bomb-laden car into a nightclub a terrorist. ~ Dennis Prager

What made us different from other westerns was the fact that 'Gunsmoke' wasn't just action and a lot of shooting; they were character-study shows. ~ James Arness

Do not become too pretty with yourself. And by that I mean, do not be afraid to get down in the dirt and tell stories that need to be told, using the appropriate language needed to convey the tale. Use the world around you, the people in it, the situations, the timeless problems and delimmas and yearnings. The further you get from this, with ornate and flowery language, with homogenized and predictable storytelling, the further away you push the audience. For the reason the reader has come to you, the writer, is to see themselves. In Romance, in Westerns, in Science Fiction, in Horror. They want to be able to put themselves in your story, to live it, see it, breathe it. Even if they are unfamiliar with the world you've created or are frightened by it, or it makes them uncomfortable, the reader wants the thrill of a rollercoaster ride. So give the audience its monies worth. I've said this before and I'll say it again. Tell me a good story and I will listen. ~ H.L. Sudler

In the John Wayne movies, the Indians were savages that were trying to scalp you. That culture has really suffered because of the stereotype you see in those westerns. ~ Ricky Schroder

Westerns have often been considered the ugly stepchild of genre writing... ~ Johnny D. Boggs

People had their image of what a cowboy was, ... A lot of it was perpetuated by the media presentations of the cowboys in fiction and old Westerns. And because of the tenure of the times, African-Americans were left out. As a result, reality was distorted. ~ Philip Roberts

People are always asking me why they don't make Westerns like they used to. ~ Roy Rogers

What the fuck is wrong with Westerns? Westerns are the shit." "Oh yeah, tell me, why are westerns THE SHIT?" Ti said, air quoting around THE SHIT. "Because back in the old west, the men were real men. They took charge of the situation. They handled their business by earning respect and gunning down anyone who stood in their way. Cowboys were the first guys to have the balls to be lawless and say fuck-all to society. ~ T.M. Frazier

I decided to write Westerns because there was a terrific market for Westerns in the '50s. There were a lot of pulp magazines, like 'Dime Western' and '10 Story Western' that were still being published. The better ones paid two cents a word. And I thought, 'I like Westerns.' ~ Elmore Leonard

I love westerns, I'd love to make more of them. ~ Jeff Bridges

We talked to Sergei Bodrov who did "Mongel" who I thought was incredible. There was a lot of people who've done a lot of things that I really appreciate and then you go back to the Italian spaghetti westerns that our spaghetti westerns were based off of so I've seen everything. ~ Josh Brolin

One of our best dates was actually a weekend when we went to the wedding of a friend from the Teams. The couple married in Wimberley, Texas, a small town maybe forty miles south of Austin and a few hours' drive from where we lived. We were having such a pleasant day, we didn't want it to end.
"It doesn't have to end," suggested Chris as we headed for the car. "The kids are at my parents' for the weekend. Where do you want to go?"
We googled for hotels and found a place in San Antonio, a little farther south. Located around the corner from the Alamo, the hotel seemed tailor-made for Chris. There was history in every floorboard. He loved the authentic Texan and Old West touches, from the lobby to the rooms. He read every framed article on the walls and admired each artifact. We walked through halls where famous lawmen-and maybe an outlaw or two-had trod a hundred years before. In the evening, we relaxed with coffee out on the balcony of our room-something we'd never managed to do when we actually owned one. It was one of those perfect days you dream of, completely unplanned.
I have a great picture of Chris sitting out there in his cowboy boots, feet propped up, a big smile on his face. It's still one of my favorites.
People ask about Chris's love of the Old West. It was something he was born with, really. It had to be in his genes. He grew up watching old westerns with his family, and for a time became a bronco-bustin' cowboy and ranch hand.
More than t ~ Taya Kyle

You have to turn a blind eye to politics in nearly all Westerns. ~ Clive Sinclair

I guess after Dances With Wolves they probably tried some derivative westerns, and if they didn't work, they said the western is dead and moved on to something else. ~ Tom Selleck

Why westerns get segregated into a genre in Hollywood, I don't know ... It's just good entertainment. ~ Tom Selleck

The impetus for 'The Sisters Brothers' was it occurred to me that there was no neurosis in westerns, or there's a minimal amount of it. ~ Patrick DeWitt

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. ~ Creed Bratton

Hollywood cools, and when it cools you have to go to where the work is. I ran off to Italy to do spaghetti westerns. ~ Tab Hunter

Don't ever for a minute make the mistake of looking down your nose at westerns. They're art - the good ones, I mean. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle, and with the basic emotions - love, hate, and anger - thrown in. We'll have westerns films as long as the cameras keep turning. The fascination that the Old West has will never die. And as long as people want to pay money to see me act, I'll keep on making westerns until the day I die. ~ John Wayne

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. ~ James Mangold

Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies. ~ Brion James

There's another aspect about the Seventies. Blazing Saddles, as wonderful as it was, sort of hurt the Western. It made such fun of them, that you almost couldn't take them seriously from that point on. That's why only Westerns that had the stink of Watergate or Vietnam could be taken seriously. There were so few Westerns made since then, from the Eighties on, that the few directors who did were so pleased with themselves and so happy to have the opportunity that they got lost in visuals, they got lost in the vistas and the pretty scenery. ~ Quentin Tarantino

When western books are set in the present, critics seldom call them westerns: the national myth allows the West only a past. ~ Gerald W. Haslam

I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies. They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn't work out. ~ John Carpenter

'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. ~ Christian Bale