Top 40 John Sayles Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.”

— John Sayles

2. “America is a very divided country now. Not only are there red states and blue states, there are now red facts and blue facts. The right-wing believe in creationism. The left in evolution.”

— John Sayles

3. “I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn’t have to change their clothes a lot. We didn’t have an art department; we didn’t have a make-up department.”

— John Sayles

4. “I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn’t something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.”

— John Sayles

5. “There were not fifteen people in the story department and twenty-five producers and stuff. And Roger had produced 1,000 movies and directed a couple of hundred, and their comments were always very, very specific.”

— John Sayles

6. “We just said, ‘Okay, you’re in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you’re on camera, that’s your wardrobe.’ But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.”

— John Sayles

7. “Sometimes people can’t afford to work for you, or they’re not interested or available, and you hate to have written the whole movie with somebody in mind and not get them.”

— John Sayles

8. “I take more jobs when I need more money, if I’m investing in films. I take fewer when I don’t. Or if something really good comes along, I usually find a way to do a good job on it in the time that I’ve got.”

— John Sayles

9. “I don’t have a social agenda. I just don’t choose to ignore what’s in front of me.”

— John Sayles

10. “But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn’t have to pay, and all those extras; we didn’t have to pay them.”

— John Sayles

11. “If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it’s going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.”

— John Sayles

12. “To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: ‘We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,’ and when you ask what’s left, they say: ‘Well, the typing is very good.’”

— John Sayles

13. “My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it’s a pro-democracy film. And if Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that’s his problem.”

— John Sayles

14. “The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.”

— John Sayles

15. “You think this man is the enemy? Huh? This is a worker! Any union keeps this man out ain’t a union, it’s a goddam club! They got you fightin’ white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there ain’t but two sides in this world – them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s all you need to know about the enemy.”

— John Sayles

16. “I like to act. I work for scale. I don’t have an acting agent. I’m in the book.”

— John Sayles

17. “The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you’re playing a character who changes within the movie, you’ve got to do that, but you’ve got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that’s really, really tough.”

— John Sayles

18. “I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.”

— John Sayles

19. “The hardest thing about movies is doing take 12, 13, and 14, and finding new ways to do the same lines. So the early takes are actually easier and I think there’s more surprises in them.”

— John Sayles

20. “I probably wouldn’t have done as many as I did in one year, which I did when I was trying to raise money.”

— John Sayles

21. “When I read a story or see something play out in front of me I say, how come nobody’s made a movie or a television show out of this? This is something that belongs in the conversation. Certainly that’s what interests me about a project.”

— John Sayles

22. “Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren’t in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.”

— John Sayles

23. “Michael Moore, whether you like him or hate him, has done something very important.”

— John Sayles

24. “I’ve always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they’re looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, “Oh, we’ve already done something just like that.””

— John Sayles

25. “Not that I’ve always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don’t come out-but I’ve gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.”

— John Sayles

26. “When I was really young I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.”

— John Sayles

27. “I’m never at a loss for new projects.”

— John Sayles

28. “There was a widespread indignation in the American media. They were saying, How can you make a movie during an election that’s about politics? What are you doing? Are you trying to influence people’s lives? To which my response was, Well, I hope so.”

— John Sayles

29. “I’ve always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that’s what independent used to mean.”

— John Sayles

30. “As a screenwriter I’m often writing in genres where there have been thousands of movies; whereas when I direct movies they tend to be in between genres. They tend to have a little bit of a genre to them, but they’re really about the people, and they’re people we haven’t met before.”

— John Sayles

31. “I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it’s true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.”

— John Sayles

32. “It’s a mixed crowd at the dogs – black, white, hispanic – but to Walt they all look like Jackie Gleason. Heavyset guys with big plans and polyester souls.”

— John Sayles

33. “Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn’t going to give you any more money.”

— John Sayles

34. “For me the writing, when I’m going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don’t change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.”

— John Sayles

35. “I never actually do rehearsals. That’s one of the reasons that I write those bios and if I can meet with the actors I’ll meet them or talk to them on the phone. What I want is for them to come on set knowing their lines and knowing who the character is.”

— John Sayles

36. “I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: ‘Oh, you’re working on it right now?’”

— John Sayles

37. “I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don’t have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.”

— John Sayles

38. “In a movie you have all these logistical problems; all these practical problems. But you’re also going to have people come who can do things that you can’t do, and you get to direct their talents.”

— John Sayles

39. “There are genres I don’t care for, and I’ve never worked in those genres, and then sometimes there are people that I haven’t liked and I haven’t worked for those people. But if I feel like there’s a movie that I would like to go see, I’ll jump into it.”

— John Sayles

40. “There are very few distributors left to do off-Hollywood movies, and those distributors generally have got thousands of movies to choose from. So you’re pretty lucky if you get one to even take your movie and it’s pretty rare that they pay anything upfront.”

— John Sayles

41. “He likes to know things. He checks out book and record collections when he visits people, looks in medicine cabinets, takes inventory in refrigerators. He eaves drops on conversations at public phone booths. He reads murder victims’ mail.”

— John Sayles