God does guide the lives of individuals and does fill them with the Holy Ghost.
— Robert Duvall
I always thought of myself as a later bloomer, so I like some of my work more later than earlier.
I wanted to show that crime doesn't pay. If you are saved and accept the Lord, you cannot use that as an excuse to avoid punishment.
It's a cyclical thing. When they make one, everyone loves them. Different genres come around in succession. People always welcome the western. It's America's genre.
My uncle always said that I could have been a rancher.
The greatest king of Israel, King David, the author of the Psalms, sent a man out to die in battle so that he could sleep with his wife.
To this day, I still think Lonesome Dove is my best part.
We all have a cradle-to-the-grave journey to make and, in between, what do you do? There's got to be something hereafter.
You have a little bit of feeling for everyone you play.
Being a star is an agent's dream, not an actor's.
High Noon is a pretty corny movie.
I don't have many people showing up at my door. Very few people come out. When they do, I get a little suspicious. I live way up on a hill, way, way back in the country.
I wouldn't mind starting to ride some more if I had a really good horse to just work a little bit with every day.
It's no big thing, but you make big things out of little things sometimes.
Spending two years on my uncle's ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.
The money part is one of the most difficult things. Coppola always said I should do a tango movie. If it hadn't been for him, I don't know where we would have gotten the money.
Today, everything has to be made by committee, and has to have special effects, but there's always room for good films.
We either accept weaknesses in good people or we have to tear pages out of the Bible.
You just can't take a crash course to be a tango dancer in a movie.
Hollywood is still the mecca for good or bad, but it isn't the beginning or end for filmmaking.
I like to do things that I develop from the ground up.
I'll keep on acting 'til they wipe the drool. I like the business. I like to do different parts and diverse characters. I haven't lost my enthusiasm yet!
My father's people... are from Fairfax in northern Virginia, just across the Mason-Dixon line. So it was an honour to play Lee, he was a great general.
The cultural contrast I saw between religions... Catholics have a lot of mediators, going through saints and Mary or whatever. Protestants in general say things to God directly.
There was nothing wrong with shouting at God.
Very often some of the religious miracle plays you see on television can be very corny, I find. And so simplistic.
You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich.
You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.
