Top 150 Ethan Hawke Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Jealousy, fear, and anger are all obstacles to a knight’s first goal: a clear mind.”

— Ethan Hawke

102. “I kill flies, I eat meat, you know, whatever.”

— Ethan Hawke

103. “Look at this cup,” he said, pointing to the other small blue ceramic cup still sitting on the white tablecloth. “It is not overanxious to be filled. It sits patient, unmoving, and empty.” Carefully, he poured a small amount of tea into that cup. “You must be like this,” he stated with a mischievous grin, gesturing to the steam gently rising from the second blue cup. “Answers to your questions will come, but if you are not still and empty, you will never be able to retain anything.”

— Ethan Hawke

104. “I’ve always been interested in directing. I started acting when I was thirteen years old, so I’ve had some desire to do something else in my life.”

— Ethan Hawke

105. “It’s always a unique challenge when you’re working with somebody where English is their second language.”

— Ethan Hawke

106. “I’ve turned down good directors before because I knew the part didn’t speak to me and I’ve worked with less talented directors before because the part I had such passion for.”

— Ethan Hawke

107. “Some people burn out, and some people like Clint Eastwood, he was a wild, international movie star in his 30s, and he’s doing the best work of his life now. Go figure.”

— Ethan Hawke

108. “When you start becoming really successful, the demons start to tempt you – the demons of vanity and self importance, drug abuse, the feelings of fraudulence. But, it’s also a thrill. That’s what I found weird.”

— Ethan Hawke

109. “Understanding that he relies on all that surrounds him, a knight is kind above all.”

— Ethan Hawke

110. “People are conditioned to just you know, like, you know we’re like little birdies going to the bird feeder you know, or the little cows going to the salt lick. We just like what we’ve seen before.”

— Ethan Hawke

111. “I thought I was so much smarter than everybody. And I’m not.”

— Ethan Hawke

112. “Your development as a person should coincide with your development in all aspects of your life.”

— Ethan Hawke

113. “I’ve had several moments in my career where it seemed like I might not age out of the bracket the world wants to put you in. It’s hard to keep growing up inside the performing arts. It’s very difficult, and presents a lot of unique challenges.”

— Ethan Hawke

114. “I don’t think Emma Watson needs any advice. She’s an incredibly smart young woman who knows what she wants out of life and she has some great parents.”

— Ethan Hawke

115. “One of the things that’s really lousy about making movies is that you have such little interaction with your audience.”

— Ethan Hawke

116. “There have always been two ways to be rich: by accumulating vast sums or by needing very little.”

— Ethan Hawke

117. “There’s only so often you’re going to have an opportunity to contribute at a high level and that you should be grateful whenever one presents itself and not take it lightly.”

— Ethan Hawke

118. “I have a daughter and the thing I wish for her is not love, fame, money or anything like that. It’s just one great best friend. You know, if you have somebody that has your back, you’re gonna be all right.”

— Ethan Hawke

119. “I feel the same about cocaine as I do about eating meat,” she said. “It’s vile and ultimately morally reprehensible, but as long as I don’t pay for it – I find it quite enjoyable.”

— Ethan Hawke

120. “I’ve had a lot of experience in independent film, and about how to choose. You’ve got to be very discerning about where you put your five bucks, and where you cut and what you don’t cut.”

— Ethan Hawke

121. “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.”

— Ethan Hawke

122. “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.”

— Ethan Hawke

123. “To get to be somebody who gets to love what they do for a living, that’s so rare, and so there must be some kind of price you have to pay.”

— Ethan Hawke

124. “My favorite stories are human, so I’m always looking for.”

— Ethan Hawke

125. “I was being taken around by a press agent at the Venice Film Festival at age 18. Was it fun? Sure. But it was a dangerous path to be walking on as far as having a substantive life. Because the casualty rate at the Venice Film Festival for 18-year-olds? High.”

— Ethan Hawke

126. “If I do three movies in a year, I don’t feel like acting ever again.”

— Ethan Hawke

127. “Whenever a really passionate, talented filmmaker seems to have an interest in me, I take it very seriously because I like to work.”

— Ethan Hawke

128. “My goal is to tell good stories. And to try as best I can to do something new with acting. To learn from the past and to be a relevant artist. To make stories that are interesting and contemporary and to tell some kind of emotional truth.”

— Ethan Hawke

129. “The truth is that the more you get paid, the less freedom you have. They never pay you for nothing.”

— Ethan Hawke

130. “I don’t know what has happened to movies, but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long. It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic – a movie about Gandhi; something with very important subject matters.”

— Ethan Hawke

131. “All that stuff with the tabloids is a kind of luxury tax I pay for all the good things I do in my life.”

— Ethan Hawke

132. “One of the things I can do is to try to put myself in different kinds of movies and that kind of subtly changes my work. By the time my obituary is written, I want there to be a great western and a great comedy.”

— Ethan Hawke

133. “It’s difficult to make any kind of action movie that might be unique or worth watching.”

— Ethan Hawke

134. “Its difficult to do a genre film well, and it doesnt matter if youre 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.”

— Ethan Hawke

135. “A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You’re always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.”

— Ethan Hawke

136. “The older I get, the more obvious it is that you’re not really in control of your life, you’re a part of a larger wave, no matter who you are.”

— Ethan Hawke

137. “I do not want you children to use my untimely death, or any setback that life may deliver, as an excuse not to take responsibility for yourselves.”

— Ethan Hawke

138. “I’m always trying to look for how I can find human stories that aren’t just dramas.”

— Ethan Hawke

139. “Time is so much a part of what makes you close to people.”

— Ethan Hawke

140. “One of the hardest things about my job is that there kind of is no one rulebook that applies to all situations.”

— Ethan Hawke

141. “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.”

— Ethan Hawke

142. “It is the fact that time is passing that creates its preciousness.”

— Ethan Hawke

143. “Those who cannot easily forgive will not collect many friends. Look for the best in others and yourself.”

— Ethan Hawke

144. “Music is constructed in notes. Language in words. Both are communicating. Music is a language of feeling, the heart. Words are the music of the mind. Theater is their marriage.”

— Ethan Hawke

145. “It’s funny – but there will be no need for insurance in heaven. None at all. And there will be so much need for poetry and songs and jokes. People will value what you’ve learned. It doesn’t matter if you can make a living. Shakespeare will be important. You will be so valuable, William. And I will just sit there listening, realizing how I’ve misspent my life.”

— Ethan Hawke

146. “Everything that’s happening, is happening inside the self. And whatever the self is, it is not William Harding the movie actor or the adulterer. Whatever the self is will not die when your body has worms crawling through your eye sockets.”

— Ethan Hawke

147. “I looked around me and absorbed the peace of a sprawling bustling city stopped dead, socked in snow. My puppy jumped and barked, twisting and sliding. I was instantly wildly grateful just to be awake and witness all this stillness. I don’t ever want to die, I thought, I want to live forever.”

— Ethan Hawke

148. “In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say ‘Hey, listen to me, and i’ll listen to you’, we’re starting a dialogue. And when you do that, this healing happens, and we come out of our corners, and we start to witness each other’s common humanity. We start to assert it. And when we do that, really good things happen.”

— Ethan Hawke

149. “That’s the point of acting: to bring about awareness of humanity, to conjure compassion, and to alleviate shame.”

— Ethan Hawke

150. “Thank God. You are now a little bit lighter, you are a little bit more you. ‘Cause if you can lose it – a car, an idea, a belief, a woman – it wasn’t yours.”

— Ethan Hawke