Quotes by Screenwriters

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
I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but safety first!
J.K. Rowling
It's a strange city... filled with things that are not obvious.
A.M. Homes
I've been failing for like ten or eleven years. When it turns it'll turn. Right now I'm just tryin' to squeeze through a very tight financial period get the movie out and put my things in order.
Francis Ford Coppola
I think of birth as the search for a larger apartment.
Rita Mae Brown
You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.
Ray Bradbury
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual
John Irving
No one likes sarcasm, Miss Cain. I’ve merely delayed my exit to promise you something. You took my straight razor, li’l darlin’. That I view as an unforgivable offense. So when the time comes, when you have served your purpose, I swear to you I’m gonna kill you for free.” And with that, Billy-Ray Sanguine disappeared into the ground. Then he popped his head back up. “Or at least half price.” And he was gone again.
Derek Landy
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
Gore Vidal
When you use more than 3-5% of your brain, you don't want to be on Earth!"-Bob Diamond, Interdimensional Attorney, from the Albert Brooks' movie, Defending Your Life
Albert Brooks
Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox from birth or dressing up a dog to look like a fox. Or hiring David Attenbrorough, who probably knows a few foxes well enough to ask a favour.
Emma Thompson
Paparazzi arrived for Hugh [Grant]. We had to stand under a tree and smile for them.Photographer: 'Hugh, could you look less -- um --'Hugh: 'Pained?
Emma Thompson
And we were in our thirties. Well into the Age of Boredom, when nothing is new. Now, I’m not being self-pitying; it’s simply true. Newness, or whatever you want to call it, becomes a very scarce commodity after thirty. I think that’s unfair. If I were in charge of the human life span, I’d make sure to budget newness much more selectively, to ration it out. As it is now, it’s almost used up in the first three years of life. By then you’ve seen for the first time, tasted for the first time, held something for the first time. Learned to walk, talk, go to the bathroom. What have you got to look forward to that can compare with that? Sure, there’s school. Making friends. Falling in love. Learning to drive. Sex. Learning to trade. That has to carry you for the next twenty-five years. But after that? What’s the new excitement? Mastering your home computer? Figuring out how to work CompuServe? “Now, if it were up to me, I’d parcel out. So that, say, at thirty-five we just learned how to go on the potty. Imagine the feeling of accomplishment! They’d have office parties. "Did you hear? The vice president in charge of overseas development just went a whole week without his diaper. We’re buying him a gift." It’d be beautiful.
Phoef Sutton
I’ve matured. I have a much higher tolerance for boredom.
Tom Perrotta
The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the east ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of solving Amy. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. My old Amy, damn, she was fun. She was fun. She made me laugh. I'd forgotten that. And she laughed, From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small finger-shaped hollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.
Gillian Flynn
The thing is, if you're an ugly goon when you're 15, you're an ugly goon for the rest of your life — until the day you die. You're always a goon, even if lots of years go by, even if you get married and have a kid, even if you're more successful than you ever thought you'd be in your wildest dreams. You're still that same goon who everybody laughed at. It never changes.
David Handler
Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It’s like a homepage without a scroll button?
Dennis Lehane
She is too intelligent to be a good daughter-in-law
Chetan Bhagat
Marble flooring is to a Punjabi what a foreign degree is to a Tamilian
Chetan Bhagat
For our Hogwarts is in danger from external, deadly foesAnd we must unite inside her or we'll crumble from within
J.K. Rowling
Hasn't your experience with the Time-Turner taught you anything, Harry? The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed...
J.K. Rowling
You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think we don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself plainly when you have need of him.
J.K. Rowling
I just take the train from platform nine and three-quarters," - Harry Potter
J.K. Rowling
And again Harry understood without having to think. It did not matter about bringing them back, for he was about to join them. He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him.
J.K. Rowling
She needs to sort out her priorities
J.K. Rowling
First think of the person who lives in disguise,Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies.Next, tell me what's always the last thing to mend,The middle of middle and the end of end?And finally give me the sound often heardDuring the search for a hard-to-find word.Now string them together, and answer me this,Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?
J.K. Rowling
Hey, look — Harry’s got a Weasley sweater, too!”Fred and George were wearing blue sweaters, one with a large yellow F on it, the other a G.“Harry’s is better than ours, though,” said Fred, holding up Harry’s sweater. “She obviously makes more of an effort if you’re not family.
J.K. Rowling
It's leviOsa, not levioSA!
J.K. Rowling
You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!
J.K. Rowling
Then he heard a terrible cry that pulled at his insides, that expressed agony of a kind that neither flame nor curse could cause, and he stood up, swaying, more frightened than he had been that day, more frightened, perhaps, than he had been in his whole life...
J.K. Rowling
I didn't like Dali: now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt . Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall after a bath.
Sachin Kundalkar
But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way o show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet is all we have.
Cormac McCarthy
Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.
Neil Gaiman
He said to the cardinal, "I'm a peasant, not instructed in the ways of heaven. But I have never broken my word. And you, a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, with all your holy garments and crosses of Jesus, lied to me like a heathen Moor. Your sacred office alone will not save your life.
Mario Puzo
In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion.When writing about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box.
Akira Kurosawa
I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die.Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now.
Neil Gaiman
It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't.
Lauren Miller
Maybe we're standing like coins on the edge?"Allie considered this. "Meaning?""Meaning, we might be able to shake things up a little, and find a way to come up heads.""Or tails," suggested
Neal Shusterman
He was a commander in the Russian army at a time when the Russians were our enemies and still part of the Soviet Union . This wasn't very long ago, Alex.The collapse of communism. It was only in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down." She stopped. "I suppose none of this means very much to you.""Well, it wouldn't," Alex said. "I was only two years old.
Anthony Horowitz
I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark.
George MacDonald Fraser
Creating something is only half the battle. The other half is finding people who care about it.
Ramsey Isler
He restrained himself from another wisecrack, infinitesimally but with great effort attempting to close down his nightclub approach to education; every positive change in his life, every minute increment in character, acquired more or less through shame.
Richard Price
The Dark Powers have to give before they can take.
Stephen King
You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the girl of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.
David Nicholls
That red spot!” she says with alarm.“That’s a freckle!”“It wasn’t there before...” she says as she inspects her entire arm.“It’s cute.”“It’s not cute.”“Then it’s mine,” I say. “If you don’t like it, it’s mine. I’ll call it Brady.”“My freckle?”“Yes.”“You’re naming my freckle after yourself?” she says. “And you think I have issues?”“It’s like a star. People buy stars in the constellation and name them after people al the time. As gifts.”“So then are you buying my freckle? Because I don’t know if you can afford my freckle. My freckles don’t come cheap, you know.”“I’ve already claimed it,” I declare. “It’s not up for discussion anymore. Just eat your ice cream. And don’t spill any on Brady.
Caprice Crane
Jaime gave her [Brienne] a hard smile. "See, wench? We know each other too well.
George R.R. Martin
Manipulating the media is akin to poisoning a nation’s water supply – it affects all of our lives in unimaginable ways.
Lance Morcan
In the far reaches of the world, under a lost and lonely hill, lies the TOMB OF HORRORS. This labyrinthine crypt is filled with terrible traps, strange and ferocious monsters, rich and magical treasures, and somewhere within rests the evil DemiLich.
Ernest Cline
Parvati positively beamed. Harry could tell that she was feeling guilty for having laughed at Hermione in Transfiguration. He looked around and saw that Hermione was beaming back, if possible even more brightly. Girls were very strange sometimes.
J.K. Rowling
As they spoke, the only thing I could think about was that scene from Julius Caesar where Brutus stabs him in the back. Et tu, Eric?
Nicholas Sparks
Without honor, a knight is no more than a common killer. It is better to die with honor than to live without it.
George R.R. Martin
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline of his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable.Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour.
Warren Ellis
Begging for help never gets you any.
George R.R. Martin
Personally, I think, so what? Money's just a thing and things change. That's what I've found. One minute something's really there, right next to you, and you can cuddle up to it. The next it just melts away, like a Hershey's kiss.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
The singing grew louder as they approached the church. It made Harry’s throat constrict, it reminded him so forcefully of Hogwarts, of Peeves bellowing rude versions of carols from inside suits of armour, of the Great Hall’s twelve Christmas trees, of Dumbledore wearing a bonnet he had won in a cracker, of Ron in a hand-knitted sweater…
J.K. Rowling
There were relatives of their victims among the Hogwarts students, who now found themselves the unwilling objects of a gruesome sort of reflected fame as they walked the corridors: Susan Bones, whose uncle, aunt, and cousins had all died at the hands of one of the ten, said miserably during Herbology that she now had a good idea what it felt like to be Harry."And I don't know how you stand it- it's horrible" she said bluntly.
J.K. Rowling
I must be overtired', Buttercup managed. 'The excitement and all.''Rest then', her mother cautioned. 'Terrible things can happen when you're overtired. I was overtired the night your father proposed.
William Goldman
The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.
Mylo Carbia
Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs.
Nick Hornby
When in doubt go the library
J.K. Rowling