Robert Redford
I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?Collection: Environmental
Be careful of success; it has a dark side.Collection: Success
Part of me is drawn to the nature of sadness because I think life is sad, and sadness is not something that should be avoided or denied. It's a fact of life, like contradictions are.Collection: Sad
Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.Collection: Food
When you get older, you learn certain life lessons. You apply that wisdom, and suddenly you say, 'Hey, I've got a new lease on this thing. So let's go.'Collection: Wisdom
Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing - there is no greater example than golf, because you're playing against yourself and nature.Collection: Sports
I am a cynical optimist. Big opening weekends are like cotton candy. The films you will remember over time are the films that stick in the consciousness of the audience in a good way.Collection: Movies
I have the freedom to take chances, to say no. I have the freedom to be who I really want to be, rather than have to conform to this or that just to stay alive.Collection: Chance
I'm fascinated by journalism. I put a keen eye, not a negative eye, on its role, particularly how it is changed by the times we're living in.
I have no regrets, because I've done everything I could to the best of my ability.
I'm not a facelift person. I am what I am.
I was never a good student. I had to be dragged into kindergarten. It was hard to sit and listen to somebody talk. I wanted to be out, educated by experience and adventure, and I didn't know how to express that.
Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It's harder and harder to find what the truth is.
I had a mild case of polio - not enough to put me in an iron lung, but enough to keep me bedridden for weeks. As I came out of it, my mom wanted to do something for me. She realized that, growing up in the city, I'd missed out on a lot of nature.
Never revisit the past, that's dangerous. You know, move on.
All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.
I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.
It's an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.
In fact you've got your hands tied behind your back when somebody chooses to take a low road in to you, there is nothing you can do about it, and so you just live with it and move on.
I'm interested in that thing that happens where there's a breaking point for some people and not for others. You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there's no sign that it's going to get any better, and that's the point when people quit. But some don't.
I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.
I didn't know the technical language of filmmaking, so I said, 'OK, I'm going to do my own storyboard,' because I had to explain to the crew and the technical people what I wanted.
Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.
The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it's all in the story.
Sundance was started as a mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent.
I am passionate. I am political about my country, about what it is, how strong it is, how strong it remains.
Going to Santa Fe is like going to Greece. It's not that special compared to other areas. The pinon pines are no different than pinon pines elsewhere. But there has been culture there longer than in most places, and you feel it.
I don't think about when it's going to stop and what you do before it stops. You just keep moving.
I'm not a left-wing person. I'm just a person interested in the sustainability of my country.
I think a lot of people thought my career started with Butch Cassidy.
For me, the Sundance Institute is just an extension of something I believed in, which is creating a mechanism for new voices to have a place to develop and be heard.
I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.
For 'Jeremiah Johnson,' nobody wanted to make that film. I went to Sydney Pollack, and I said, 'Sydney, I live in the mountains, and I would like to make a film about a person that had to exist in the mountains and survive in the mountains.'
I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.
Golf has become so manicured, so perfect. The greens, the fairways. I don't like golf carts. I like walking. Some clubs won't let you in unless you have a caddy and a cart.
Generally speaking, I went through that. I came to a place where I realised what true value was. It wasn't money. Money is a means to achieving an end, but it's not the end.
He's meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules - a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness - the temptations of life.
I'm not interested in a film about golf but I am interested in golf as a metaphor.
You can't completely control the sport - Tiger Woods comes close. The test is against yourself and nature's own way. I find golf a particularly good metaphor for this story.
As an actor and as a person you come together with being in familiar territory although that has not been my whole life. That's been a part of it. I think a lot of people associate me with the west because of Sundance.
I did not, like my children and people today, grow up with television as part of my life.
I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
I had just arrived in New York from California. I was nineteen years old and excited beyond belief. I was an art student and an acting student and behaved as most young actors did - meaning that there was no such thing as a good actor, 'cause you yourself hadn't shown up yet.
It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.
Lastly get emotionally connected to your story so you can deliver it, you know, if you can't deliver the emotions to your script there's no point to your story. Story is the key.
Once the festival achieved a certain level of notoriety, then people began to come here with agendas that were not the same as ours. We can't do anything about that. We can't control that.
Radio, newspapers, they were normal parts of my life. In those days, you had to go somewhere to watch television and leave something to see it.
There is nothing I can do about this stuff and I am pretty well ok with the fact that I think Sundance is not going to be stopped by it, because he Festival is itself now, and doesn't need me out there to talk about it like I did years ago.
Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.
Well first of all it's a business and it's a tough business, and you have to have the strength to survive all the set backs all the failures that make this a mean business, that's getting meaner and meaner every year in my opinion.