Billy Bob Thornton Quotes

Every character I play is me, always has been.

If something really strikes a chord with an audience, if it pops on TV, I don't mind watching it for a few minutes.

I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.

I believe in running through the rain and crashing into the person you love and having your lips bleed on each other.

You never know what an audience is going to think about something. The ones that the audience doesn't get, I tend to let them go. I don't like to dwell on them too much.

Directing takes a good chunk of your life out. It's a very hard thing. As an actor, you go in for a couple of months and do your job, and then you move onto another one. As a director, it's with you for quite some time and you're responsible for the entire thing, whether the results are good or bad, or whether people throw darts at you or put you on a pedestal.

They always say 'Is there going to be a sequel to Bad Santa?' and you know, I mean, a long time ago they would talk about, you know, we're going to do a sequel to that but it was never serious. And they said 'Would you do it?' and I said out of all the movies I've done, that was a lot of fun, and maybe I would do a sequel if it ever came up and it made sense, but I said I don't think that's ever going to happen.

Just the other day, my assistant was on the line with Calvin Klein. Golly, I usually shop at Sears.

Playing normal-looking characters really intimidatesme. I got into acting to play anyone but me.

We didn't have a movie theatre until I was about nine, so I just didn't see them. But, once I got into movies I loved them.

Life is magical and I guess my thing is I wish that people wanted that magic.

Well I loved Little League; so all the memories are pretty fond but I broke my thumb. That wasn't a lot of fun. I think probably the first time I pitched [I started out as a first baseman] and the first game I pitched in Little League, I struck out 10 batters. I had a curve ball a little early [laughs]. You're not really supposed to have one when you're 12, but I did, so I first game I struck out 10 batters. That's possibly my fondest memory.

I grew up in Arkansas and that's the law. My dad was a high school basketball coach, so I was raised as a coach's son and I was a baseball player back in Arkansas, and I lived in Texas, too, so I was just surrounded by sports. So that's what I was going to do: Pitch for the St Louis Cardinals. I had no idea I was going to be an actor. So I got my collar bone broken in the Kansas City Royals training camp. And once I got hurt I started doing other things for a while.

Now, if you want to do realistic, kind of heavier acting stuff, you do it on Amazon or Netflix or whatever or HBO.

Nowadays the movies that people are going to see in the theaters are the big-event movies, like Spider-Man or something, or they're 25-year-old models who are vampires, or they're very broad comedies, or they're standard action movies. So if you're going to work for a studio and do a movie for the budget that the movie needs, those are the kinds of movies you'll be in.

I think my stuff's kind of obsolete now, you know? I'm making Model Ts or something, and everybody else is making spaceships.

I quit flying years ago. I don't want to die with tourists.

I can't sit through plays and musical theatre. I just want to run up onstage and mess up their hair and turn over the furniture.

I always wanted to play a lawyer.

Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.

I figured I would have to tell someone to kiss my ass before it was all over, and I have -- twice.

It's not that I don't understand it. But people think if you speak with an English accent it somehow makes you smarter.

People's attention spans are a little shorter these days. Same thing with food and movies.

Tower Records is like a temple to me. I'll stay there for hours. Nobody can shop for records with me. It drives them out of their minds.

People always like stories about the little guy fighting the big guy.

Independent films now, they want to give you $2 million to make it, 21 days to shoot it and they want 10 movie stars in it.

When you weigh 135 pounds and you're telling people who are 6'4" and 250 pounds to get out of your way, how do you do that? Well, a lot of that is in the eyes.

I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.

I know that I loved music before I loved movies, simply because I didn't see movies as a kid.

LA has its own vibe. It has a charm that a lot of people overlook sometimes.

I've been largely an improvisational actor for most of my career.

Sometimes I have songs born out of stories.

Every couple I know has side-by-side grave plots, but when we do it we're the biggest weirdos on the block.

I’m not much of a drinker, so I’m going to eat seven pounds of pork.

We don't shoot in L.A. much anymore. You know, TV and movies, most everything's shot other places.

These days and times you can't do eclectic records. In the '60s you could, but not anymore.

I think Americana music is music that is generally more singer/songwriter oriented. It has more to do with the songwriting. The music, it's more like stories set to music.

I tend to like to move on. I don't sit around and dwell on things much.

You can't knock a place where you realized your dreams.

I think everybody's contemplating TV now, because mid-level and high-budget independent films are not being made now.

Somewhere along the line we stopped believing we could do anything. And if we don't have our dreams, we have nothing.

If someone is talking to you and tells you that you ought to do something, and you can tell they mean it, those are the scary people. Those are the people you want to watch out for.

I'm not sure that I'm really relevant as a director anymore. Or as a writer, either, to tell you the truth.

The audience, that's who I care about.

Sometimes we don't want the bad guy to get caught because otherwise the story is over. You want to at least see it through to the end.

Directing is a big responsibility to take on. I think I'm only good at doing things I know very well. I don't direct movies because I get offered the new vampire movie or science fiction movie. I don't get offered those, anyway, but if I did, I would just tell 'em, "Look, I'm the wrong guy." I only do things about people and situations, and I do the ones that I think I'm the best guy for the job on, which is usually something I generate myself.

To tell you the truth, I don't ever talk about characters as separate from myself.

If you're going to take care of your kids and pay for your house and do something good for adults, you have to do something on television now.