Kiefer Sutherland Quotes

The western will always be here. And it just depends on how good you make one. And one movie doesn't kill it. And one movie doesn't preserve it. It's storytelling. It's a very American thing. I'll continue to do it.

I've always thought of the western as American storytelling at its best.

In the early West, law and politics were parallel roads to usefulness as well as distinction.

The reason I wouldn't dare to write a Western is simply because that seems to be so much a part of American culture. Maybe if I want to write a Western enough I should try to overcome that fear, but I'll certainly feel like I'm trespassing. I feel that that is so much a part of American foundation myth, it's part of the myth of America, the American vision of what America is, which people have glorified and then challenged and then vilified.

Settling other people's land is an American tradition.

I've always been really hot on westerns. All my life growing up, cowboy, cowboy, cowboy.

If a western is a good western, it gives you a sense of that world and some of the qualities those men had - their comradeship, loyalty, and physical courage.

Westerns aren't about the gunfight, even though it has to be there at one point. It's not what they're about, at least the good ones. It's about the drama. It's about the resourcefulness of men and women.

It is clear that the vehicle of the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my ideas.

The western is a universal frame within which it's possible to comment on today.

I'm really glad Westerns have had a revival. Hopefully our little resurgence will last a while.

The West - the very words go straight to that place of the heart where Americans feel the spirit of pride in their western heritage - the triumph of personal courage over any obstacle, whether nature or man.

I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together.

I think that the Western went away for a while because part of its function was that it used to be America's action film.

The period western doesn't have a lot to say to most people today.

The history of my state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving West to seek better lives.

When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

I've never been specifically attached to westerns, but there are those I like - one of the best westerns I've seen is 'Unforgiven.' I think the genre has something extremely powerful that can allow them to talk about good and evil in a very straight way.

I love westerns, I'd love to make more of them.

What made us different from other westerns was the fact that 'Gunsmoke' wasn't just action and a lot of shooting; they were character-study shows.

When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush.

I haven't read hardly any Westerns, to tell you the truth.

'The Sisters Brothers' started out as a little bit of dialogue between these two men who became Eli and Charlie Sisters.

The West was extraordinarily violent in the mid-19th century, and it continued to be more homicidal than the rest of the United States until the 1930s.