Quotes by Filmmakers - Page 14

...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
Ransom Riggs
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Norman Mailer
Together we'll make magic...Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She'd never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn't so sure.
Ruth Ozeki
Don’t worry…three vampire meanies and a horse won’t keep me away from you.” Kalina looked at Jaegar. Jaegar shrugged. “If you don’t get it, it’s before your time.” “And what time is that?” “The Dark Ages…that’s why you’ve never heard of it before. Everything was kept in the dark…
Kailin Gow
Carlos: So, what, were they psychos, or... Seth: Did they look like psychos? Is that what they looked like? They were vampires. Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are!
Quentin Tarantino
[on his satisfaction as an artist] In terms of cinema and filmmaking, there are certainly the unexpected gifts that the actors bestow on you. Film is always a question of compromises with respect to what you originally intended.
Michael Haneke
The empiricist assumes without any evidence or proof that his experiences somehow give him a magical access to reality. So completely does he identify experience and reality that he cannot liberate himself from thinking of the two as one and the same. In equating experience and reality, he is making a huge and unwarranted leap. But this breakdown of reason is not easy for him or us to recognize because our human minds have a built-in disposition toward illusion – the illusion that reality must be exactly the way we experience it. The irony is that many of the people who proceed in this irrational way think of themselves as following strictly along the pathways of reason.
Dinesh D'Souza
Change. Adapt. Bend so as not to be broken. Let opportunity guide your actions.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Moving right alongIn search of good timesAnd good news,With good friends you can't lose.This could become a habit.Opportunity just knocked,Let's reach out and grab it,Together we'll nab it,We'll hitch-hike, bus, or yellow cab it.
Jim Henson
Yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sister how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars--she was all of them, and she was so much more that just just her that I still didn't know.
Davy Rothbart
Sophie: "For the Create-A-Tale Competition, your story ended with Snow White eaten by vultures and Cinderella drowning her-self in a tub."Agatha: "I thought it was a better ending.
Soman Chainani
Samir loves Joe’s face. He studies it every day in class: a face as old as his own but already, in eighteen years, the cli s and hills and odd proportions of its geography have been shaped by life’s weather. Samir likes to observe the ever-watchful green eyes, hidden in their shadowy alcoves over the at nose and cheekbones, and the heavy brow that scrunches up with Joe’s moods – all those sculptural planes could have been carved by Easter Islanders. en there’s the pout of his lips, the pucker of their concentration or the twist of their anger. But most of all, Samir examines the thoughts as they cross the wide-open landscape of the face. Tries hard to read their cloud shapes from the merest shadow.
Peter Bunzl
She had a heart the size of France and the lucky few whom she loved, she loved with every square inch of it. But it's size made it dangerous.
Ransom Riggs
A man can see by starlight, if he takes the time.
Michael Crichton
A deep level of personal engagement is key to good writing and complete immersion by the writer will translate into a richer and more engaging experience for the reader.
Nidhie Sharma
If wars create vast sums of money for the global elite, is it possible the Soviets, the Viet Cong and Muslim extremists were, or are, also fabricated enemies of the West along with North Korea? Or at least exaggerated threats?
James Morcan
What are the chances that of all 1.59629 quadrillion square feet of physical land on planet Earth, three major world religions are literally fighting over one single rock?
Jared Brock
When the bullseye becomes as big as an elephant in your mind, you won’t be able to miss it.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.Murder in the Dog Park
Jill Yesko
finding in motion, what was once in place
Brian Heffron
You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.
Don Roff
People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.
Michel Houellebecq
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
Susan Sontag
Be yourself. The world worships the original.
Jean Cocteau
Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away
Norman Mailer
All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself.
Michael Crichton
I love books where I can't wait to turn every page, songs that grab me the first time I hear them, and films that make me totally forget about the craft because I am totally engaged in the story.
John Grooters
The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.
Michel Houellebecq
Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.
David Byrne
When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.
Don Roff
Don't think about the writing process too much. Just do one thing: tell the motherfucking story.
Don Roff
I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough — I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.
Miranda July
What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.
Ryū Murakami
Marriage is like a three-speed gearbox affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straightaway. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learned from affection and friendship.
Peter Ustinov
Oh, no, no, you've got that all wrong. You're not required to respect elders. After all, most people are idiots, regardless of age. In tribal cultures, we just make sure that elders remain an active part of the culture, even if they're idiots. Especially if they're idiots. You can't just abandon your old people, even if they have nothing intelligent to say. Even if they're crazy.
Sherman Alexie
You got a choice, dude. We've all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we're making choices. You've just been making bad ones, is all.
Ruth Ozeki
She looked out at the other trees, and she realised that her life was one of thousands, any one of which could have been her, she had grown wherever her life had taken her, she had drifted wherever the wind had blown her.
Dave McKean
If you limit your choice only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.
Robert Fritz
Because when the night gets here, I’ll be the youngest I’ll ever be again, so I will laugh and celebrate relative youth.
Darnell Lamont Walker
So often, the discarded love of youth is desperately yearned for in maturity.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Young people today seem to be coming around to the idea it really doesn’t matter which politician or political party you vote for; and they’re catching on that it doesn’t even matter if you don’t vote because they have realized modern elections are just a way for the 1% to appease the 99% – a way to keep the masses in line by making them believe they’ve had their say, thereby perpetuating the lie that democracy continues.
James Morcan
Politicians would be well advised not to hold their breath for youth to engage in politics any time soon. Today’s youth are the first generation to have realized for real change to occur, it must happen on an individual level rather than at an administrative level.
James Morcan
I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I'd ever seen or felt before.
Ruth Ozeki
As a matter of habit, I stop and pick up seashells that interest me, and I always put the ones I really like in a lovely Baccarat bowl in my living room. It's my way of remembering that I once was young and carefree.
Adriana Trigiani
He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.
Michel Houellebecq
Life ends with a snap of small bones, a head cracked from its stem, and a spirit unmoored...
Sarah Kernochan
I have to believe in reincarnation. believing that I'll be in one place forever is a hell in itself.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Then, when I thought it couldn’t get any better, I see it. And I knew, only then, that I’m truly in Heaven.
Mandi Lynn
He sang 'Stairway to Heaven' in four different languages but never knew where that staircase stood.
Sherman Alexie
I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.
Norman Mailer
I do not need drugs to be a genius, do not take a genius to be human, but I need your smile to be happy.
Charlie Chaplin
Strange that, the way happiness only works in retrospect.
Peter Akinti
the price you pay for opening your eyes is the easy life you can no longer have. but it becomes worth it.
Darnell Lamont Walker
You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's like to die without any life to die to, and without evn knowing that's what he's doing.
Marguerite Duras
Home is where you were conditioned.
Darnell Lamont Walker