Robert Duvall Quotes

Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.

You know, I'm from the South, and I wasn't interested in perpetuating a stereotypical southern character.

I grew up in the South, and I think there are lots of people who have distorted views of the South.

President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state, Illinois.

I think we typically, as Northerners, stereotype what the South is in so many negative ways. We kind of forget all the beautiful things that they contribute to make this country a country.

Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.

The South: What is this place? What's different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don't agree about the answers.

Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it's the heartland of America. It's a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it's beginning to pass.

It's the South that maintains the idea that they're different, which is interesting because nobody else really cares.

Writers who aren't from rural states in the Midwest or the West often treat such people as if they were the Waltons or the Beverly Hillbillies.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

Well, it's like my movie, 'The Apostle.' Some people in the North don't get that movie. They think that, in the South, if you don't shout, you can't play one of those guys.

I said that liberals think people who live in the middle of the country are a bunch of jerks, and obviously all liberals don't think that. But I will tell you what, an awful lot of liberal elites think that.

Everyone thinks because you're from the south you know everyone down there, but it's not like that; I never knew nothing about no Mississippi.

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.

I liked 'The Help,' and I love Viola Davis. But I didn't think that film was a great film; I thought that was a very uneven film. I thought the Southern women were so caricatured that it was kind of like 'Harper Valley PTA' or something like that.

There was always a love-hate relationship with New York in the rest of the country, but I made them feel more love than hate.

Accents can be a great tool to tell a story - but if you do it wrong, it pulls you right out of the movie.

Southern regional pride can be used to great advantage without unnecessarily alienating potential anti-Southern votes.

I come from the south, so you're useless, and you're a bit pathetic. That's the first thing that the northerners think of you. You're also from the city, so you are used to having your cappuccinos and your luxuries and getting your chicken from a plastic packet.

I think a common misconception about a small town in rural America is that everyone believes the same way, and nothing could be further from the truth.

I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation - as an actor and as a person - perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it's cute.

People live in their part of the Union, and if they don't travel a lot, then there is a tendency to believe that the other parts of America couldn't possibly be as American as their part. You can see it in the way people in the South scrunch up their faces when they hear words like 'New York,' 'Chicago,' and 'challah.'

I see how the Midwest distrusts the East Coast. The Midwest sees itself as morally superior. The Coast sees itself as intellectually superior. And the two are actually the same thing.