Top 70 Greta Gerwig Quotes

I’m so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn’t belong.

As an actor, I just go off the director. I never ask how big the part is. I don’t look at it from the perspective of, ‘Is this going to be good for my career?’ I just look for directors, and I think part of that is I knew I always wanted to be a director.

Young Harrison Ford, what a dreamboat.

Acting was always the first love, but a lot of people want to be actors, and my goal was, ‘Come hell or high water, I will be a part of this world, however I can.’ So that just led me to throwing myself into every aspect of narrative storytelling I could.

For me, the French new wave is Truffaut and Rohmer. Godard I sometimes have trouble with because he’s very much of a director’s director. I feel Truffaut is such a humanist, and I always go in that direction.

I always feel like a vague failure in L.A. – it always makes me feel like I should somehow be different than I am. And I don’t know why.

I’ve never worked on anything that I haven’t in some way enjoyed.

I loved dance.

I always have a soft spot in my heart for New York designers and independent designers, people who are doing the fashion equivalent of what I’m trying to do in film.

One of the things that happens when you write characters – and maybe this is my own sentimentality – is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

When you’re on set, and that clock is going, every second you spend doing something is a second you spend not doing something else. That’s true of all of life, but it’s very vivid on a film set because you’re always managing that.

Books and theater were the way I understood the world and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life.

I think it’s a great tragedy of childhood that you only really appreciate it once it’s done: it’s very hard to feel appreciative of the gifts you have until you’re gone.

There’s a style in modern dance right now called Release Technique. It’s based on a feeling of falling and catching yourself, and I thought it was such a good metaphor for the way life feels.

The economy is rough. I think that affects everyone from big filmmakers to tiny filmmakers.

When I read ‘Greenberg,’ I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I’d be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.

I’m interested in long careers where you take detours.

I think as an actress, I prefer having a character on the page. It allows you to be more invested in actually creating a whole person. It’s easier when you’re not trying to come up with your next line on the spot.

I love movies, so getting to be in the conversation and meet some of my heroes has been so fun. It’s just the most fun thing ever.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they’re communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

When I was a kid, I used to do my homework in the living room, where there was a picture window. I was hoping that someone would walk by and see me looking very studious in my living room.

When you’re writing a screenplay, it’s like you’re dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it.

I’d applied to graduate school for playwriting, and I got rejected by every school. I felt that theatre was closed but that, when it came to film, the door was very slightly ajar. If I have any virtues, it’s that I’m good at walking through doors that are slightly ajar.

You only get one life, so you might as well feel all the feelings.

I’m not goal-oriented so much as I’m constantly aware of what I’m passionate about, and I’m constantly updating the list. I envision many possible futures for myself where I could be happy, so I just try to keep my passions alive.

In terms of sheer pleasure, Tom Stoppard was very big for me because he is so funny and so smart, and it felt delicious reading him.

I’ve made so many films in New York. There was an assumption I think a lot of people had that I am a New Yorker, that I am from New York, and I always felt like nothing could be further from the truth.

I feel like, when I play characters, I create a space in myself that feels like the character and that doesn’t go away. Somehow, you carry that with you. You let it go, but a little piece of it remains.

It’s really hard for me to be around people I admire.

Getting bad reviews or doing something that’s not great is also really good for you as an actor. It also makes me feel as an actor that I’ve earned my stripes a bit.

I think I’ve always wanted to direct, but I didn’t go to film school. I was lucky enough to work in movies, and I think those became my film school in terms of acting and watching directors work and also writing and co-writing and producing.

I love big, sprawling movies where there are too many characters, and people get introduced halfway through, and you’re like, ‘Wait, who are these people?’

I’m far too middle-class to morally object to a paying job.

I don’t really decide what the core of the story is before I write. I write to figure out what the story is. And I think the characters end up talking to you and telling you what they want to be doing and what is important to them. So in some ways, your job is to listen as much as it is to write.

I think something about high school students being snobby about how much they have or don’t have is particularly absurd because it’s not theirs. It’s their parents’. So to feel quite good about yourself because you’ve got the fancy house and car doesn’t make any sense – you didn’t earn any of that.

The Catholic theatrics are pretty high quality, but the Protestants have better hymns.

From Rebecca Miller, I took the idea that the director needs to arrive every day an hour ahead of everyone else and walk through the entire day.

There are a lot of love stories in ‘Maggie’s Plan,’ but the deepest, truly romantic one is between Maggie and her daughter.

I loved ‘Moonlight.’ I thought it was really beautiful. Really great.

I feel like movies are presents, and credits and fonts are bows and wrapping paper. I like everything to feel like it was given a lot of time. I hate it when I watch movies, and it seems like they just went and picked a font and, like, called it a day.

I feel like a good pair of diamond studs goes a long way. They make everything look dressy, and you just seem more put together.

I didn’t know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.

I’m, like, the only actor in New York who’s never, ever been on any ‘Law & Order.’ And I’ve auditioned for so many. The sad thing is I love ‘Law & Order.’ I’m really obsessed with it. And they always said to me, ‘You seem like you’re making fun of the material.’

When I did plays in high school and college, I never remember memorizing my lines, but once I had blocking, I had all my lines memorized. Once I had movement associated with words, it was fine. Before I had blocking, it was just text on a page. Once it became embodied, it was much easier.

I think structure is so deep in us. We put it in stories we tell our friends or in emails we write. We want it. It’s how we create meaning.

Writing on my own versus co-writing kind of is the exact same thing because we don’t sit in the same room when we write. We’re always writing alone anyway.

I sound like an old man when I talk about the Internet, but I am actually worried about what it’s doing to our brains and our sense of connection.

I’m not really capable of memorizing stuff without moving around, that’s how I do it.

The more particular you make something, the more universal it becomes.

Specifically with directors I’d worked with, and even some that I haven’t, they were all incredibly generous with me, having really long conversations about what they felt was useful as tips.

One of my favorite things about Telluride is because it’s so small, the directors are really there for each other. You look at another director, and they feel the same thing you feel.

I’m really interested in trying to tell stories about women that don’t involve romantic components. That’s so much a part of the way we feel about female characters and their needs that it feels like it’s built in – but I’d like to find a way that it’s not. There are so many more stories than that.

I’ve never had a plan, I’ve always done things from instinct.

I think that people in their 20s actually aren’t given enough credit for their ambition.

I wrote the script to ‘Lady Bird,’ and it really came out of a desire to make a project about home – like, what the meaning of home is, and place. I knew Sacramento very well, obviously, growing up there, and I felt like the right way to tell a story of a place was through a person who’s about to leave it.

I love writing, and I think I’m kind of a workaholic. I’m happiest when I’m working.

I was part of a hip-hop group called Fly Style. I was one of two white girls, and I was part of the younger company, which was called Touch of Style. And it was amazing. It gave me a different perception of dance and beauty because the other girls were mostly African-American and Latina.

Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema.

‘A People’s History of the United States’ was actually a very big book for me. I read it in high school, and I felt like my mind was really blown by it. I think the truth is I read it because it’s referenced in ‘Good Will Hunting.’

I knew I wanted to be involved with theater or film in any way I could, either as a writer or director or actress.

When I graduated from college, I thought that I would probably never be an actor because it seemed like everyone was big by the time they were 20 or not at all.

I’m scared of the Internet. That’s not real, but it is. I’m worried about what it’s doing to us.

Everybody is always in the middle of their own opera.

I’m interested in characters that have just a touch of madness.

Courage doesn’t grow overnight. It can be a long process.

I have a fundamentally hopeful view about people, and that might merely be a reflection of the fact that I’ve lived an incredibly privileged life in a very wealthy nation without a lot of the struggles that most of the world has to face.

I wouldn’t call myself ‘into the DJ scene.’ I have friends who are DJs, like James Murphy. I was really into the DJ scene at his wedding. But generally, I’m not at the clubs. I’ve never been to a rave.

Making movies is a hard thing, and it’s slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.

I stopped being interested in improvisation, and I continue to not be that interested in it. Comedians can do it on a different level because they have a goal, but if you’re improvising something that’s dramatic, there’s not that much to be good at.

I have very strong feelings about dance and how it’s shot.