"We live in a funny time. If you don’t go corporate, you can’t compete. You’re relegated as irrelevant. People used to admire that. There used to be something badassed and poetic about it."
Ethan Green Hawke is an American actor, author, and filmmaker whose career on both stage and screen has spanned four decades. Known for his versatility across a range of roles and collaborations with director Richard Linklater, he has worked in both independent films and blockbusters. His accolades include a Daytime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for five Academy Awards, three Golden Globe
"The older you get, the humbler you get. I know I dont have that much to offer, and I know Ive now read Moby Dick and Anna Karenina, and if I had read those books before I wrote The Hottest State, I dont think Id have published it. I had the arrogance of the uneducated, which sometimes you need."
"People look at your life and see things as a big deal that arent a big deal to you. What I mean is, the chapter breaks are different for me. Ill read about my divorce, and what people think about it, and, well, its so inaccurate, usually, but the fact is, I wouldnt want it to be accurate. Because its my truth. When I was younger, it was more important to me to come off well. Now, I just want to try to be good at what I do."
"A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. Youre always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare."
"Its its own form of cinema, its its own entity. I think Chekhov would like Before Sunset because its all about nuance. Any decent screen-writing school would throw that script out. Theres no beginning, middle and end, its completely fluid, just chasing the nuance of life, and kind of believing whatever God is lives in this kind of energy that flows between all of us. I kind of live for that, for that chance that you might get another opportunity to be a part of something like that."
"All that stuff with the tabloids is a kind of luxury tax I pay for all the good things I do in my life."
"People love actors. They love reading about them and thinking about their lives. But they also secretly hate them. They think their lives are frivolous and all they do is go to parties, and they dont know real problems... Theres something at the root of our love-hate relationship with celebrity that I think has the makings, if you could do it in a really substantive way, of a great modern American novel."
"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"