- Pat: Donny, shut up, okay? Just shut up.
- Donny: Fine. As soon as you admit the real reason you wanna make movies.
- Pat: Because it cuts through all the stupid high school social caste system bullshit, okay? It gets past all the stupid goddam armor everyone wears. When you're watching a movie you're sitting with 500 people who wouldn't even sit next to you in lunch, and you're laughing at the same jokes and crying at the same painful moments, and you're jumping at the same scares. There aren't any cliques in the movie theater. There aren't any jocks or geeks or nerds or brains, okay? As long as it's dark and there is something you have never seen before on the screen, it's like your family, where nobody yells or fights... or leaves.
- Herb Lightman: Because Hollywood is the least likely place on the planet Earth for anyone's dreams to EVER come true.
- Herb Lightman: When I was a kid they used to show these short films before the feature called "serials" and they weren't very good. In fact, they were actually kind of terrible in a wonderful sort of way because you could almost imagine the actors suddenly turning to look out at you and saying, "Look, we know you can tell we made these sets out of cardboard, and we know that you can see the wires holding up our spaceships. But look how much fun we're having." And those stupid little films meant more to me than any big budget Hollywood extravaganza because they gave me hope that with a little allowance, a little ingenuity and a little stolen time with my dad's old windup movie camera, I could make movies too... and I did. Boy, did I!
- Bill: Pat, if every person in town loved this movie, you would still be alone. Because to everybody else, movies are something to do when you're tired of real life. To you, real life is something to do when you're tired of watching movies.
- Pat: But I'm never tired of watching movies.
- Bill: My point exactly. Some people live to work, other people work to live.
- Bill: Hey, Moon Watcher, you can't get there from here. This ain't Cape Kennedy. And it sure as hell ain't Hollywood. It's just Gurney.
- Pat: You go along with the rest of the herd that needs to believe that being intelligent and having hopes and dreams is for nerds, or geeks, or dorks. But inside, you know it isn't.
- Bill: You're afraid you're going to go see this movie and everything will be the same. You'll still be Pat Johnson making his little movies in his backyard.