Quotes by Screenwriters

What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity's arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man's planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn't do.
Ben H. Winters
No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.
M.R. Carey
Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie.
Cormac McCarthy
I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.
Neil Gaiman
Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.
Neil Gaiman
First law of gossip - there's no point knowing something if somebody else doesn't know you know it.
Ben Aaronovitch
Did you know that the origin of the word gossip in English is "god-sibling"? It's the talk between people who are godparents to the same child, people who have a legitimate loving interest in the person they talk about. It's talk that weaves a net of support and connection beneath the people you want to protect.
Beth Gutcheon
Damned no matter what you do. Why do people think knowing secrets is fun?
Beth Gutcheon
These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoken into the wrong ear. Impugn a man's character, and everything that man does is made to seem underhanded, suspect, fraught with double motives.
Paul Auster
Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population.
Paul Scott
It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.
Nathanael West
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.
Paul Auster
Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It’s a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is.
Dennis Lehane
I was good at being charming, one of my very few vanities.
Jeff Lindsay
[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
David Nicholls
I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.
Peter S Beagle
Lockhart'll sign anything if it stands still long enough.
J.K. Rowling
She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.
Gillian Flynn
Cancer gets a bad press but, fair do's, it's a truly egalitarian illness, unlike those stuck-up bastards ME and motor neurone.
Ian Pattison
I want to know who I am before it is too late—before I am no longer the same person—before I become someone different. Although there are days when this seems a furious race against time, there are others when it seems to matter not a tinker's curse.
Alan Bradley
Why has no one come to pry me out of here?- Cersei
George R.R. Martin
I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everyone was, especially me.
Stephen Chbosky
Shit. The mind gets up to funny tricks, doesn't it? Shadows grow faces.
Stephen King
You were what you were and you are what you are. Fuck that regrets bullshit.
Irvine Welsh
He was a Parisian,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.
Ben Aaronovitch
When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn’t find a whore in all of Paris. They were too busy paying their respects. That was a man – and he still has a show on in the West End.
Hanif Kureishi
For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can't paint in Paris, you'd better give up and marry the boss's daughter.
Alan Jay Lerner
We'll always have Paris.
Howard Koch
I'm saying the American way is to overcome, to conquer, to come out on top. And we do it by spending and eating and screwing our women harder than anyone else. That's all I'm saying.
Neil LaBute
We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
Gore Vidal
A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor.
George R.R. Martin
Humans have too many rights and not enough responsibilities.-Aras
Karen Traviss
The obsession with the afterlife is born of a panic at not having memories of a before-life.
Dean Cavanagh
See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That’s what God’s love does. If you’re beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it’s because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you’ll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.
Ian McEwan
Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction?
William Boyd
He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he'd burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn't done it, and wouldn't had made her his anyway, but you see why he'd have figured it did. Or maybe I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don't love like that anymore. Or maybe it's only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don't know.
Peter S Beagle
I really admired Cesar Chavez and Gandhi, but my form of activism would have to be the written word, not the empty stomach. My parents had brought my family t the United States because of the fear of empty stomachs.
Josefina López
Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
Ray Bradbury
What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.
Stephen King
She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.
John Irving
Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don’t want to begin with “Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.
William Goldman
Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
Thomas Harris
I never really feel that I’m stuck. I actually think that people are never stuck, there’s no such thing as writers block, I think that theres terror that can silence you. But if you can think of it as a dynamic thing I mean a writers block, it’s a paralysis an immobility and the thing that has immobilized you is a very powerful force. Immobility is itself an act, it’s a choice. It can sometimes take as much energy to remain immobile as it does to be mobile. And if you think of it in a dynamic way then it’d freeze you from the sense that at some point your talent will simply abandon you and you’re just a vacant shell with nothing to say, I don’t think that ever really happens. But I think that terror, bad experience, trauma and so on can absolutely silence you.
Tony Kushner
Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.
Stephen King
How can I get up everyday knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive and I couldn't do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?
Marsha Norman
Mama:...you can keep trying. You can get brave and try some more. You don't have to give up.Jessie: I'm NOT giving up. This IS the other thing I'm trying. And I'm sure there are some other things that might work, but MIGHT work isn't good enough any more. I need something that WILL work. THIS will work. That's why I picked it.
Marsha Norman
Mama: But something might happen. Something that might change everything. Who knows what it might be, but it might be worth waiting for! (Jessie doesn't respond.) Try if for two more weeks.Jessie: No, MamaMama: i'll pay more attention to you. Tell the truth when you ask me. Let you have your say.Jessie: No, Mama. This is how I have my say. This is how I say what I thought about it ALL and I say No. To Dawson and Loretta and the Red Chinese and epilepsy and Ricky and Cicel and you. And me. And hope. I say No.,
Marsha Norman
Or was he saying, "Hi! Wanna play?"And I did. Of course I did.
Jeff Lindsay
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Tom Stoppard
Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet.
Gillian Flynn
JD/Dr Cox: The second you start blaming yourself for people's deaths, there's no coming back.
Bill Lawrence
He blamed every fucker available excepting, of course, the one who was actually to blame, the one sitting in his saddle and getting colder, hungrier, and more lost with every unpleasant moment. ‘Shit!’ he roared at nothing.
Joe Abercrombie
Monsters are very real. But they're not just creatures. Monsters are everywhere. They're people. They're nightmares...They are the things that we harbor within ourselves. If you remember one thing, even above remembering me, remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked once within the soul of a man.
C. Robert Cargill
She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.
M.R. Carey
The world is chock-full of monsters.
Rafael Yglesias
Monsters were one thing. She was used to monsters, she could deal with monsters. A noise in the darkness, with nothing attached to it, was another.
Paul Cornell
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
Stephen King
Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.
Neil Gaiman
Deciding what to read is also a matter of filtering.
Jean-Claude Carrière
The Plutocracy’s insatiable hunger for pixelated information is enough to put a bulimic Pac-Man to shame
Dean Cavanagh