Daily Inspiration Quote by Howard Hawks

Hawks strips directing down to its oldest job description: hold an audience with a story, then deliver it with enough velocity that nobody has time to get bored or self-conscious. Calling himself a storyteller isn’t modesty; it’s a shot across the bow at the prestige instincts that were already creeping into Hollywood even in his era: the director as painter, poet, philosopher-king. Hawks replies: nice, but the camera records time, so your real medium is momentum.

“And they’re moving pictures, let’s make ’em move!” works as both pep talk and aesthetic manifesto. The line is breezy, almost tossed off, but it smuggles in a strict standard: cinema should behave like cinema. Movement here isn’t only literal action (though Hawks helped define the grammar of chase, banter, and brinkmanship); it’s narrative propulsion, a refusal to linger in decorative meaning. His films often look deceptively plain, yet they’re engineered for flow: overlapping dialogue, clean staging, scenes that start late and exit early, characters always doing something, wanting something, pushing.

The subtext is craft pride with a faint contempt for pretension. Hawks is defending popular entertainment as a discipline, not a lesser art. In the studio system, where directors could be treated as hired hands, he reclaims authority by defining the job in terms of results: if the picture doesn’t move, you didn’t direct. It’s a practical philosophy that still reads like a rebuke to today’s self-serious “cinema” that mistakes slowness for depth and posture for vision.