Quotes By Ethan Hawke

As a young man... you don't know anything about yourself. And add on to that, you're on the cover of magazines. People are interviewing you about what you think. You feel like a real phony.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

It is very difficult for any couple who are married if both people are ambitious. I don't know if it's just too hard to be married to a woman that wants to be a movie star.

I kill flies, I eat meat, you know, whatever.

I think having nature be a part of people's lives helps all of us see ourselves as part of something larger.

At every turn, when humanity is asked the question, 'Do you want temporary economic gain or long-term environmental loss, which one do you prefer,' we invariably choose the money.

The theater, for me, has always been a place where I'm free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.

Everyone has to pay their child support, and no matter if you're a Hollywood actor or anyone else, it's always a little bit more than you want to pay.

There's some kind of actors that can radically change who they are from movie to movie. I've never really been that kind of actor. I enjoy changing the worlds that I'm in.

I think that as soon as you think of yourself as a famous person or anything like that, you're objectifying yourself in some weird way.

I have had so many bad auditions.

I met a lot of famous people when I was about 24. And none of them seemed very appealing. And so I didn't know why I would struggle to be that kind of person.

In your mid-twenties, the paint is still wet on who you are.

Right now, if you're interested in being a dramatic actor, they're not making that many just regular dramas. Movies have to have some other thing going on.

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.

The more kind of head trippy sci-fi. I always like that. I was a big 'Twilight Zone' freak.

When an analogy is really singing, it's what you want it to be.

I think that if you walk through this life and I end up being a bad father, then it won't matter anything else I achieved in my life. It will all be irrelevant.

When you do 'Before Sunset,' you know while it's a limited audience, there was a very small group of people that love 'Before Sunrise.' You feel a certain pressure to make sure that you uphold a level of quality that has been a bar. You set a bar and you have to at least match it.

I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi.

My relationship to reality has been so utterly skewed for so long that I don't even notice it any more. It's just my reality.

If you're not a real chameleon of an actor and if you're not one of those guys who can really shape-change themselves all the time, one of the ways to keep pushing yourself and keep changing is to be in different kinds of movies.

I thought I was so much smarter than everybody. And I'm not.

It was never in my dreams to make my personal life anybody else's business.

I auditioned for Robert Redford once and I was so starstruck I couldn't even speak. I had a mic wire at a screen test clipped to me and then I got kind of nervous and I paced in a circle and then took a step and tripped and fell on my face. You just have to forgive yourself and keep going on.

There's something about knowing life is finite that makes it so precious.

'Brooklyn's Finest,' this is the kind of movie that's why I want to be an actor, to tell real-life stories. This is where I feel my job is, to interpret life.

If you can understand the inner life, then you can wear the uniform, the tattoos, or whatnot and realize that the things that are different about us become superficial.

It's difficult to do a genre film well, and it doesn't matter if you're talking vampire movies or 'Dawn of the Dead' or 'The Thing' or 'Escape From New York.' Those kind of movies, they understand what the old-school B-movie is supposed to be, they get the throwback of it.

I always felt that a marriage works best at a farm... where you're together and everybody has clear-cut roles; they have chores, 'you take care of this' and you know. But it's hard.