Billy Bob Thornton Quotes

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

You read something and you just feel this makes sense. And sometimes before you even read it you have a feeling that yeah, I'm probably gonna do this one.

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 generally have lyrics first, but you can't help that when you're writing lyrics you start to get a melody in your head. So they come kind of simultaneously.

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

[The lyrics and melody] usually come a little simultaneously, but I would say the lyrics are first; usually I have the idea for a story in my head, or few lines.

I actually am a phobic twitchy sort of nervous guy.

My mom was a psychic. And there's a movie called The Gift that I'd written years ago with Cate Blanchett which is loosely based on my mom.

I can't imagine laying a finger on my kids. I go the other way and probably because my father was so abusive.

After you've done 60-something movies, you're always looking for something different.

Comedy is harder than drama, because with comedy you're expecting a result..you make them laugh. [If] they ain't laughing then you're screwed.

Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.

Sometimes I have songs born out of stories.

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.

I don't think anybody chooses to be an underdog.

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

If you look at a character as a mountain over there that you have to climb, then I think you've lost 50 percent of the air.

I've led a very eclectic life.

You have to really know what you're saying.

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.

The ones that work out really and ones that become something to the audience, those are the most important people.

I always wanted to play a lawyer.

When I was coming up, if you were on a TV show, that meant something was wrong with your career. Now it means something's right with your career.

The great movies that I want to do now are being made for $2.5-million budgets.

My songs aren't built around choruses or hooks or anything like that. That's kind of how I write screenplays too.

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

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.

As most characters are that I play, there's a lot of me in it, anyway.

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

I'm not really a guy who wants to be a director, anyway.

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

I'm not a TV junkie outside of sports and history really and stuff like that.

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

A lot of kids, when they go to church, they don't really pay much attention to what they're saying or whatever.

I don't know how to type so I handwrite everything.

People over 40 stay home and watch television, that's why there are no movies out there.

I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else.

When you're a kid, somebody's mid-forties, you think they're an old man. Then you grow up and it's like, I was a kid.

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

My dad didn't hug me every day and say he loved me and anything like that.

Nothing wrong with computer as things. They can work wonders in communications and business and medicine and everything else.

I'll always consider myself a Southerner. A lot of people put California down, but my dreams were realized there.

If you want anybody to have a different voice, you really have to visualize and hear the voices of all these people. Sometimes when I write with specific actors in mind, it helps.

Kids won't watch older movies - they want to see what's hip right now.

Normally you're 21 years old and you look like Tom Cruise and you do a couple underwear commercials first and then you're a movie star. That didn't happen for me. So it was all quite overwhelming.

I've watched other directors as an actor and I picked up little things here and there about cameras, [but] I wouldn't consider myself the guy you'd want to hire to do Star Trek.

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.

When I saw that show Lost I learned something. Other than one sort of big dude if you're in an airplane crash only models survive. So you know sit next to somebody pretty, but anyhow.