Quotes by Filmmakers - Page 36

Sometimes our walls exist just to see who has the strength to knockthem down.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Just start off with the same goals in mind. If you have the same values, same goals then you'll be on track for the same future.
Angelina Jolie
Friendships are nice. So is competence.
Michael Crichton
I have never bought into the idea that blood is thicker than water. Love and respect are meant to be earned from our children, our spouses, our families, and our friends.
Raquel Cepeda
No one here is embarrassed of their gift.
Ransom Riggs
An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary in 2016 is irrelevant.An African American Studies class that is not inherently revolutionary in 2016 is irrelevant.
Darnell Lamont Walker
These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, “How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.” He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu. But as a professor who was popular with his students—and who advocated general education—Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory.
Michael Crichton
Experience does for the soul what education does for the mind.
Casey Neistat
He worked with her as she was and not as he wanted her to be.
Colin Clark
Ignorance is ultimately the worst enemy of a people who want to be free.
Jonathan Hennessey
Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.
Frank Zappa
If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
Frank Zappa
[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.
Jim Henson
If you're not aiming at perfection, you're not trying hard enough.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The most successful people I know are also the most reliable.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Success is fucking up on your own terms.
Guillermo del Toro
If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly's wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon-- you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks.
Michael Crichton
I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance.
Ruth Ozeki
You read a book for the story, for each of its words," Gordy said, "and you draw your cartoons for the story, for each of the words and images. And, yeah, you need to take that seriously, but you should also read and draw because really good books and cartoons give you a boner."I was shocked:"Did you just say books should give me a boner?""Yes, I did.""Are you serious?""Yeah... don't you get excited about books?""I don't think that you're supposed to get THAT excited about books.""You should get a boner! You have to get a boner!" Gordy shouted. "Come on!"We ran into the Reardan High School Library."Look at all these books," he said."There aren't that many," I said. It was a small library in a small high school in a small town."There are three thousand four hundred and twelve books here," Gordy said. "I know that because I counted them.""Okay, now you're officially a freak," I said."Yes, it's a small library. It's a tiny one. But if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish.""What's your point?""The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know."Wow. That was a huge idea.Any town, even one as small as Reardan, was a place of mystery. And that meant Wellpinit, the smaller, Indian town, was also a place of mystery."Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all of the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you keep on learning so much more you need to learn.""Yes, yes, yes, yes," Gordy said. "Now doesn't that give you a boner?""I am rock hard," I said.
Sherman Alexie
A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.
Michael Crichton
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Susan Sontag
Christianity enhanced the notion of political and social accountability by providing a new model: that of servant leadership. In ancient Greece and Rome no one would have dreamed of considering political leaders anyone's servants. The job of the leader was to lead. But Christ invented the notion that the way to lead is by serving the needs of others, especially those who are the most needy.
Dinesh D'Souza
The life of West, Nietzsche said, is based on Christianity. The values of the West are based on Christianity. Some of these values seem to have taken a life of their own, and this gives us the illusion that we can get rid of Christianity and keep the values. This, Nietzsche says, is an illusion...Remove the Christian foundation, and the values must go too.
Dinesh D'Souza
He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it.
Michael Crichton
Anyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.
Michael Crichton
Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?
Frank Zappa
There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.
Frank Zappa
My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.
Frank Zappa
Well, in this world of basic stereotyping, give a guy a big nose and some weird hair and he is capable of anything.
Frank Zappa
What doesn't kill me provides writing material.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
If Aphrodite chills at home in Cyprus for most of the year, then Fez must be the goddess’s playground.
Raquel Cepeda
Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.
Raquel Cepeda
Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.
Man Ray
Support and encouragement are found in the most unlikely places.
Raquel Cepeda
Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived. Your job as a storyteller is not simply to entertain. Nor is it to be noticed for the way you turn a phrase. You have a very important job--one of the most important. Your job is to let people know that everyone shares their feelings--and that these feelings bind us. Your job is a healing art, and like all healers, you have a responsibility. Let people know they are not alone. You must make people understand that we are all the same.
Brian McDonald
When I observe Gram, I see how fragile the notion of tradition can be. If I take my eyes off the way she kneads her Easter bread, or if I fail to study the way she sews a seam in suede, or if I lose the mental image I have of her when she negotiates a better deal with a button salesman, somehow, the very essence of her will be lost. When she goes, the responsibility for carrying on will fall to me. My mother says I’m the keeper of the flame, because I work here, and because I choose to live here. A flame is a very fragile thing, too, and there are times when I wonder if I’m the on who can keep it going.
Adriana Trigiani
For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
I try hard not to judge anyone, and I try to bless everyone who is a part of my life, particularly anyone with whom I am having any problems
Jim Henson
I was kind of excited to go to jail for the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.
Quentin Tarantino
I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard.
Jim Henson
The whales do not sing because they have an answer, they sing because they have a song.
Gregory Colbert
Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together.You can do it.
Sherman Alexie
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.
Don Roff
If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.
Don Roff
Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.
Don Roff
So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. I have a screenplay called Mephisto's Bridge about a Faustian deal with the devil. I love them all.
Guillermo del Toro
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
Susan Sontag
Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.
Phil Cousineau
If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.
Don Roff
It's always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in open air, they fly away from me.
Philippe Claudel
A migraine is the cockblock of writing.
Don Roff
As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.
Quentin Tarantino
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
Susan Sontag
I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.
Don Roff
CHAPTER 2: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSALDO THE APACHEMy name is Lt. Aldo Raine and I'm putting together a special team, and I need me 8 soldiers. 8 Jewish-American soldiers.Now, y'all might've heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we'll be leaving a little earlier. We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis.Now, I don't know about y'all, but I sure as hell didn't come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross 5,000 miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily and jump out of a fuckin' air-o-plane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin', mass murderin' maniac and they need to be destroyed. That's why any and every every son of a bitch we find wearin' a Nazi uniform, they're gonna die.Now, I'm the direct descendant of the mountain man Jim Bridger. That means I got a little Injun in me. And our battle plan will be that of an Apache resistance.We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are.And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us.And the German won't not be able to help themselves but to imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives.And the German will be sickened by us, and the German will talk about us, and the German will fear us.And when the German closes their eyes at night and they're tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us they are tortured with.Sooounds good?
Quentin Tarantino
Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.
Richard Flanagan
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
Norman Mailer
Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag