Robert Redford quotes

Born
August 18, 1936, Santa Monica, California, U.S.

Occupation
Actor,  director, producer.

Charles Robert Redford Jr. is an American actor, director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, and philanthropist. He is the founder of the Sundance Film Festival.

Movies
All the President’s Men (1976)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

What I would do is when I was younger I would draw in a sketch book something that happened in my life and then write a little something on the side about what happened or what the story.
– Robert Redford

I began by doing a lot of character work on TV, just fun acting parts.
– Robert Redford

I never had a problem with my face on screen. I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by actors and actresses that tried to keep themselves young.
– Robert Redford

Sundance was started as a mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent.
– Robert Redford

Be careful of success; it has a dark side.
– Robert Redford

When I was a kid, nobody told me I was good-looking. I wish they had. I would’ve had a better time.
– Robert Redford

I think a lot of people thought my career started with Butch Cassidy.
– Robert Redford

The important thing about a sport is the people who devote their lives to it.
– Robert Redford

We program the festival, after 20 years, exactly the way we did on the first day.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

I really do miss being able to go through life a little less noticed.
– Robert Redford

Filmgoers are starved for new ideas, voices and visions.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

It’s good to say, ‘Look, I can’t always be right, but my gut tells me this’ – and then you confirm with your gut.
– Robert Redford

I’ve always liked speed. I own a car that I shouldn’t be talking about because I’m an environmentalist, but the 1955 Porsche Spyder 550 RS is the finest sports car ever made.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

If you talk about an issue, what comes back is a description of what you’re wearing. Reporters only want to know how tall you are and if your teeth are capped.
– Robert Redford

The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it’s all in the story.
– Robert Redford

I’m not a facelift person. I am what I am.
– Robert Redford

Any time I saw people treated unfairly because of race, creed, whatever – it struck a nerve.
– Robert Redford

People say I’ve gone against Hollywood, but I’ve tried to be independent within Hollywood, tried to be my own person.
– Robert Redford

I did not, like my children and people today, grow up with television as part of my life.
– Robert Redford

I’m not a left-wing person. I’m just a person interested in the sustainability of my country.
– Robert Redford

I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

The way you really find out about the performer’s seriousness about the cause is how long they stay with it when the spotlight gets turned off. You see a lot of celebrities switch gears. They go from the environment to animal rights to obesity or whatever. That I don’t have a lot of respect for.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

It’s an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

I have no regrets, because I’ve done everything I could to the best of my ability.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

When I go for a project, I wonder what underpinning a project will have that’s going to give the audience some emotional access to it.
– Robert Redford

Park City is developing itself, almost to death.
– Robert Redford

When I was a kid, all I knew was that I felt more comfortable sitting in one chair than in another. And now I realize it was because one chair was older. I still respond directly to the age of things.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

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.
– 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?
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford

For me, personally, skiing holds everything. I used to race cars, but skiing is a step beyond that. It removes the machinery and puts you one step closer to the elements. And it’s a complete physical expression of freedom.
– Robert Redford

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.
– Robert Redford