Daily Inspiration Quote by Neil LaBute

There is a sly bit of mythmaking in LaBute framing BYU not as a decision but as a kind of draft notice. “I didn’t choose BYU” rejects the consumerist script of higher education - the bright, empowered applicant curating a future - and replaces it with fate, calling, even courtship. The follow-up, “I like to think it chose me,” is the tell: not a factual claim but a preferred narrative, one that softens agency without erasing it. He isn’t denying responsibility; he’s choosing a story where belonging precedes choice.

For a director, that’s also a rehearsal of authorship. LaBute’s work often lives in uncomfortable moral rooms, where power and self-justification do quiet damage. Here, he performs a gentler version of the same mechanism: if the institution “chose” him, then his presence there becomes less about ambition or conformity and more about inevitability. That matters with BYU specifically, a school with a strong religious identity and an honor-code culture that can feel less like a campus and more like an ecosystem. Saying BYU chose him implies he fit it - or was shaped to fit it - which hints at both comfort and constraint.

The line works because it’s humble without being self-effacing. It flatters BYU (it’s discerning, almost sentient) while protecting LaBute from the scrutiny that comes with overt choice. In one sentence he creates a clean origin story: not “I bought in,” but “I was called.” That’s how people make complicated affiliations feel inevitable.