Quotes

Frequently we are writing characters and we are thinking, "Wouldn't it be interesting to see such and such play this kind of a person?", and the character starts to grow out of that as you are writing it. It's a combination of things that you are making up and what you know about the actor.

It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow -- that to me is kind of inexplicable.

[on filmmaking] I can almost set my watch by how I'm going to feel at different stages of the process. It's always identical, whether the movie ends up working or not. I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you're very excited by it and very optimistic about how it's going to work. And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

I hate when people cry in movies. It's particularly disconcerting when you're sitting at a really awful movie and you hear people all around you sobbing and blowing their noses.

We've never considered our stuff either homage or spoof. Those are things other people call it, and it's always puzzled me that they do.

The bigger stars we've worked with have been without the movie-star vanities or meshugaas that you read about and dread. [George Clooney], for example, was the opposite. He has no entourage. He's a big movie star, but a nice guy.

[Ethan Coen] had a nightmare of one day finding me on the set of something like The Incredible Hulk (2008), wearing a gold chain and saying, "I've got to eat, don't I?"

[Ethan Coen] once described the way we worked together as: one of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat. That's why there needs to be two of us - otherwise he's gotta type one-handed. That's how you "collaborate" with someone else.

[upon winning the Oscar for Best Director for No Country for Old Men (2007)] In the late '60s, when [brother Ethan Coen] was 11 or 12, he got a suit and a briefcase and we went to the Minneapolis International Airport with a Super 8 camera and made a movie about shuttle diplomacy called "Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go". And, honestly, what we do now doesn't feel much different from what we were doing then.

There's no doubt that our Jewish heritage affects how we see things.

My most important professional accomplishment? I think that it's that I'm so scintillating and engaging in an interview.

I like Hollywood just the way it is, actually. I don't think I'd change anything. I like that it's out here 3,000 miles from where I live.

Someone asked us once how we adapt novels, and Ethan [Coen] said, "Joel holds the book open by the spine, while I retype it into the computer...Don't change it [the book] if it's not broken!

[on his and his brother Ethan's choice of characters in their films] What's interesting to us are the people you know that are very good at what they do but aren't necessarily successful.

The thing about TV series that I don't understand and I think is hard for both of us to get our minds around is, you know, feature films have a beginning, a middle and an end. But open-ended stories have a beginning and a middle - and then they're beaten to death until they're exhausted and die. They don't actually have an end. And thinking about that in the context of a story is rather alien to the way we imagine these things.