Quotes by Directors - Page 9

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.
David Mamet
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
Orson Welles
Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.
Sidney Poitier
I go back to Oberlin in the dead of winter to give a "convocation speech" in Finney Chapel, the largest and most historic of campus structures. In a subconscious nod to my college experience I forget to pack both tights and underwear and have to spend the weekend going commando in a wool skirt and knee socks. I am toured around the school like a stranger by a girl who didn't even go here. We stop at a glossy new cafe for tea and scones. She asks if I want a tour of the dormitories- no, I just want to wander around alone and maybe cry.
Lena Dunham
I've always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me "You're still awake! Hiiii." And I'd think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that.
Lena Dunham
Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages.
Stephen King
I believe that am entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.
Marjane Satrapi
You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you. (As Silent Bob)
Kevin Smith
I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.
Stephen King
He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?
Stephen King
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
Stephen King
Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility.
Alan Rickman
The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action.
Lena Dunham
Titles are prisons of human potential
Natasha Tsakos
You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.
Stephen King
Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners.
Stephen King
Poor, dear old Mack, he was ninety-eight per cent perfect. His two percent failing was that he had absolutely no idea of the value or the power of arbitration. He was the veteran of a hundred battles, and I never once could say to the other fellow, 'Your dog started it.
William S. Hart
No man can see himself unless he borrows the eyes of a friend
Colin Higgins
There’s no tonic like an old friend.
Stephen King
We all want to be stars. The idea of being revered and envied must be encoded somewhere deep in our DNA. So must the desire to revere and envy others we imagine to be better, more accepted, and more popular than we are. The only problem is that the most necessary qualities required to be a celebrity -- self-absorption, egomania, shamelessness -- are the least attractive in a friend.
Tonya Hurley
Work hard, keep your nose clean, and just stick around.
Clint Eastwood
All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.
Woody Allen
God makes it all come right in the end, that's what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian-I admit I fell away a bit along my journey-and I believe that: we're stuck with what we have, but that's all right; in God's eyes, none of us are really much more than flies on strings and all that matters is how much sunshine you can spread along the way.
Stephen King
Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy's exact words-why bother to go on living?
Paul Auster
And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one.
Mark Ravenhill
You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.
Stephen King
Expect the unexpected like a chain smoking, hard drinking, monochrome world dwelling Noir Detective
Dean Cavanagh
The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.
Lena Dunham
If you expect nothing, you can never be disappointed.
Tonya Hurley
If you expect nothing, you can never be disappointed.Apart from a few starry-eyed poets or monks living on a mountaintop somewhere, however, we all have expectations. We not only have them, we need them. They fuel our dreams, our hopes, and our lives like some super-caffeinated energy drink.
Tonya Hurley
There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother's life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I'd think 'This isn't the way our lives are supposed to be going.' Then I'd think 'Half the world has the same idea.
Stephen King
…but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy.
Stephen King
And there he would either be mercifully annihilated or live forever, insane and yet conscious inside It's homicidal endless formless hungry being.
Stephen King
Better to be dirty than dead.
Stephen King
It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?
Stephen King
bullshit french post-war rationalizing
Woody Allen
Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live outside time. And when you live outside time, there is no day and night. You don't get a chance to die.
Paul Auster
Destruction is as valid an artistic statement as construction. Both statements echo the model of the society we live in. The only invalid art is utopian
Dean Cavanagh
Life is more than love and pleasure,I came to dig for treasure.If you want to play, you gotta pay,You know it's always been that wayWe all came digging for treasure.
Stephen King
There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.
Stephen King
Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.
Stephen King
At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style...but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.
Stephen King
... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.
Stephen King
You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!
Stephen King
Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen King
Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.
Stephen King
It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King
Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?
Stephen King
The Only Good Greed Is Greed For Enlightening Experiences
Dean Cavanagh
There's more than enough for the many, but somehow never enough for the few
Dean Cavanagh
It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.
Stephen King
How can you kill a man who'd already been dead for years?
Peter Hedges
Not everyone believes in ghost’s, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?“ She had shaken her head slowly. "Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evie said. “That’s what ghost’s are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.
Stephen King
All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one...
Stephen King
But I had deliberately acquired the habit of closing my eyes even to such obvious assumptions, just as though I did not want to miss a single opportunity for tormenting myself. This is a trite device, often adopted by persons who, cut off from all other means of escape, retreat into the safe haven of regarding themselves as objects of tragedy.
Yukio Mishima
Carpenter: "Call Shen Te, someone! She's good!"Shui Ta: "Certainly. She's ruined.
Bertolt Brecht
And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful.
Stephen King
You can never be upset with the people who forced you into your dream or up higher.
Tyler Perry
I am grown up. That's why I cooked all this food!
Lena Dunham
I just don't want to be around people who don't hate everything in their life right now.
Lena Dunham