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 Quote

Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.
- John Sayles Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'.
- John Sayles Quote

I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.
- John Sayles Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.
- John Sayles Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.
- John Sayles Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.
- John Sayles Quote