Menu

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Paul Haggis Quotes

I miss my mother very, very much.

– Paul Haggis

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that’s the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

– Paul Haggis

I don’t think I’m against all wars, but you’d have to have a damn good reason to send your son or daughter to fight, or to go yourself. So often, we are lied to and manipulated by our governments for their own very cynical reasons.

– Paul Haggis

When I discovered European filmmakers, it affected me so deeply. It redefined what cinema could be. I mean, ‘Blow-Up’ ends with a dead body and mimes playing tennis. What?

– Paul Haggis

I don’t know how much credit I can take for ‘Walker, Texas Ranger,’ because I only worked on it for three weeks. I re-wrote the pilot, and then my name was on it forever.

– Paul Haggis

My kids paid the price for my career. We can say it’s for our family, but it almost never is. It’s about us. It’s just some of us can pretend better than others.

– Paul Haggis

Even a modicum of celebrity is hard to deal with. You see it with actors and directors all the time.

– Paul Haggis

I made a very good living as a bad writer. I wrote a lot of comedies, ‘Diff’rent Strokes,’ ‘Facts of Life,’ while all my friends were doing the good shows, like ‘Cheers,’ but I loved it because I got to be a working writer in Hollywood.

– Paul Haggis

I have never pretended to be the best Scientologist, but I openly and vigorously defended the church whenever it was criticized, as I railed against the kind of intolerance that I believed was directed against it. I had my disagreements, but I dealt with them internally.

– Paul Haggis

There’s nothing more painful than writing.

– Paul Haggis

In ‘The Next Three Days,’ even though it was a prison breakout movie, I was asking myself, ‘What would I do? How far would I go for the woman I loved? How far would I go, and what would I do when the person then told me that they were guilty? Could I still believe in them?’ So it was very personal.

– Paul Haggis

I like to write about things about which I have no answers, questions that trouble me. These things trouble me.

– Paul Haggis

Every 10 years, I know less about love and relationships. The smarter I get, the less I know.

– Paul Haggis

You can’t plan for people to like your movies. I knew that people were not going to run in droves to the theater for the ‘In the Valley of Elah.’ I knew they might not want to see it, but I still had to the movie; I felt very strongly about it. Wanting to keep telling a good story is what you want to do, a compelling story.

– Paul Haggis

We’re trying to reinvent Bond. He’s 28 – no Q, no gadgets.

– Paul Haggis

The wonderful thing about Clint is you can never second guess how he is going to react to anything.

– Paul Haggis

I like taking genres and subverting them. I did that with ‘In the Valley of Elah.’ I said, ‘Okay, this is just a murder mystery. Relax.’ And then, two thirds of the way through, I broke every convention of a murder mystery.

– Paul Haggis

I have so many questions about love. How do you win at it? Especially if you’re in a relationship with an impossible person? What if you believe in someone who’s completely untrustworthy, who at their core can’t even believe in themselves?

– Paul Haggis

I just asked myself, what piece of that man’s soul did he just chew off and swallow to get next week’s assignment? You know, just to live, just to work as an artist, or to feed the family?

– Paul Haggis

‘Crash’ was incredibly personal to me. So was ‘In the Valley of Elah.’ There were things in ‘The Next Three Days’ that were questions I was asking myself but couldn’t answer, like how far would you go for love? Can you believe in somebody who can’t even believe in themselves? But this is highly personal.

– Paul Haggis

The worst thing you can do to a filmmaker is to walk out of his film and go, ‘That was a nice movie.’ But if you can cause people to walk out and then argue about the film on the sidewalk… I think we’re all seeking dissension, and we love to affect an audience.

– Paul Haggis

As artists, we have to be brave. If we aren’t brave, we aren’t artists.

– Paul Haggis

- 1
- 2