John Sayles Quotes

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  I probably wouldn’t have done as many as I did in one year, which I did when I was trying to raise money.

   

  John Sayles

• 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.

  John Sayles

• I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn’t have to change their clothes a lot. We didn’t have an art department; we didn’t have a make-up department.

  John Sayles

• I like to act. I work for scale. I don’t have an acting agent. I’m in the book.

  John Sayles

• 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?’.

  John Sayles

• I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, ‘Okay, you fall off the horse this time.’

  John Sayles

• I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don’t have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.

  John Sayles

• I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it’s true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

  John Sayles

• For me the writing, when I’m going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don’t change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

  John Sayles

• Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.

  John Sayles

• But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn’t have to pay, and all those extras; we didn’t have to pay them.

  John Sayles

• Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn’t going to give you any more money.

  John Sayles

• And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, ‘We’re going to develop twenty-five and maybe one’s going to get made,’ so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.

  John Sayles

John Sayles (33)

Birth:	28th September, 1950
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Film Director, Novelist, Screenwriter

About

John Thomas Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York, USA. He is an American film director, screenwriter, film editor, actor and novelist. He studied at Williams College. He directed several films include: Return of the Secaucus 7 (also screenwriter, actor, editor), Lianna (also screenwriter, actor), Baby It's You, Matewan (also screenwriter, actor), Eight Men Out (also screenwriter, actor), City of Hope (also screenwriter, actor, editor), Passion Fish (also screenwriter, editor. Nominated- Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay), The Secret of Roan Inish (also screenwriter, editor), Lone Star (also screenwriter, editor. Nominated- Academy Award for Original Screenplay), Men with Guns (also screenwriter, editor), Limbo (also screenwriter, editor), Sunshine State (also screenwriter, editor), Silver City (also screenwriter, editor), Honeydripper (also screenwriter, editor), Amigo (also screenwriter, editor), and Go for Sisters (also screenwriter, editor). He has written other films include: Piranha, The Lady in Red, Alligator, The Howling, Wild Thing, Breaking In, and Men of War. He has written several novels include: Pride of the Bimbos, Union Dues (Nominated- National Book Award for Fiction), Los Gusanos, and A Moment in the Sun. He has written several short stories, including The Anarchists' Convention and Dillinger in Hollywood.

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Today's Anniversary - 2nd January

Births

• 1923 - Philip J. Davis
• 1936 - Roger Miller
• 1905 - Michael Tippett
• 1896 - Dziga Vertov
• 1976 - Paz Vega

Deaths

• 2007 - Robert C. Solomon
• 1917 - Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
• 1963 - Dick Powell