Peter Hedges Quotes

Lucas is living the life that I wanted, but I want to be clear, I don’t feel there’s been any pressure for him to live it.

Everything good in my life can be traced back to my mother’s sobriety. She showed me that broken people can – with the help of others – turn themselves around.

Maudlin scenes where people pour their heart out to one another? I don’t want to see it.

The Orpheus myth is my favorite myth, and the prodigal son is my favorite parable.

I wanted to direct long before I’d even written a screenplay.

Black people are more likely to be incarcerated than white people. That’s just a fact and it’s regrettable and it’s got to change.

My older son works in finance and private equity, which he loves, and Lucas works in film and theater.

Over the course of my creative life, I’ve trafficked in broken, heroic mothers.

The greatest love I believe… the greatest love I have is for my children, but I think the greatest love probably universally is a mother’s love for a child.

I never try to think I have the answer to what people should do or not do.

If you wanted John Gielgud to cry, he could say, ‘Which eye?’

My formative years were all shaped by a mother who was very sad and had a drinking problem, while my father was lonely and angry. He was an Episcopal priest and raised four kids on his own.

I used to find limitations frustrating, but I find them enormously liberating.

If there’s a photo of a roomful of kids I’m the one with the biggest smile or my hand over my face.

And for better or worse, a story like ‘Pieces of April’ is the kind of story I’m supposed to tell. The kind of story that makes you laugh as much as possible but also breaks your heart.

I’m looking, often, towards younger people, listening to how they’re working, at least they’re trying, and some of the old greats, too. Just to try to remain relevant and off-balance, but hungry and eager.

I took a look at my own life and realized that I was overinvesting in my kids. I realized that I had to get out of the way and let them be who they wanted to be, not what I wanted them to be.

Something happened to me when I wrote female characters in my early plays; it was a real liberation.

I’ve read both books that ‘Beautiful Boy’ is based on, and I can’t wait to see that film. I root for that film.

One of the great kicks of having a movie made is that you envision this world.

I can go years without going to Los Angeles, but I think my living in Brooklyn is critical to my continuing to have a fairly happy life in the film industry.

Ultimately what I try to do is work on stories I love with people I admire, and sometimes they get made and sometimes they don’t.

There are so many films I lean on and look toward and return to that give me some guidance on how to keep moving in the world, and that’s what film does, at its best.

There was a part of me that wanted to take my place next to, you know, Debra Granik. She’s such a hero for me.

I want to make a series of films of contemporary America that feel urgent and deal with sometimes-topical matters, but hopefully in a universal way.

I don’t know if a mother’s love and a father’s love is that different.

I once heard a story, it’s probably apocryphal, but I love the notion. That a car had flipped over and the baby was trapped underneath the car and the mother was thrown from the car. Then the mother lifted up the car to pull her child to safety. And I believe that my own strength comes from whom and what I love.

There’s no reason that a writer, if they have some discipline and curiosities and passion, can’t be vital for a long, long time.

In my family, if something were to have happened with one of my kids, I think my wife would be the tougher one.

I wouldn’t say I’m a religious person, but I am definitely inclined toward asking the big questions.

My mother’s sobriety – that’s when I found the theater, that’s when I moved from being a basketball player to being a musician, to being an actor, to then being a writer.

I love films that take place over a short period of time, and I feel that those films are in our cinematic DNA.

Is my job as a child, even as an adult, is my job to heal the wounds of my parents’ childhoods?