Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 107

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.
Alan Brennert
Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
Steven Pressfield
The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.
Steven Pressfield
I'd say I never considered myself a great architect. I'm more of a creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares.
Maria Semple
Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.("Talking In The Dark")
Dennis Etchison
Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we’d die, we’d wander around and sleep like cats.
Ray Bradbury
I think if you study--if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.
Jim Henson
I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.
Neil Gaiman
The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. She harnesses the urge for trouble and transforms it in her work.
Steven Pressfield
If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.
John Irving
Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.
Ray Bradbury
Don't Stop Searching Until You Find Creative & Gainful Unemployment
Dean Cavanagh
So the key is doing something that sets you apart forever in the minds of regular people.Something that matters.
Matthew Quick
Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.
Gene Fowler
All of our days are numbered; we cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world changing – all held up by the tinniest of ideas.
Nick Cave
Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it. It's all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves and to others, first creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.
Nick Cave
Do you know what the imagination is, Susan?"The child nodded sagely. "That's when you see things that aren't really there.""Well, not exactly," said Kris with a smile. "No -- to me the imagination is a place all by itself. A very wonderful country. You've heard of the British Nation and the French Nation?"Susan nodded again."Well, this is the Imagination. And once you get there you can do almost anything you want.
Valentine Davies
People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.
Maria Semple
All creativity is a work in progress
Dean Cavanagh
creativity is our only weapon against entropy
Dean Cavanagh
Perfection is not just about control. It's also about letting go. Surprise yourself so you can surprise the audience. Transcendence! Very few have it in them.
Andres Heinz
It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.
Hanif Kureishi
Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters' arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.
Charlie Kaufman
And when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art.
Neil Gaiman
Creativity is the only way a man can ever experience motherhood.
Girish Kohli
You need to make a decision - are you are an imitator or an innovator?
Stewart Stafford
We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . .
Tom Stoppard
Creativity is choice-making.
Robert McKee
Every creative act, however small, enriches our species and the world around us. To find and nurture talent, is to be truly wealthy.
Stewart Stafford
I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
Ingmar Bergman
There's no substitute for imagination, but creativity is only enhanced when forged with life experience.
John Ridley
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.
Stephen King
Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to 'think out of the box' and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when 'anything goes' and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.
Mark Forster
You have to be emotionally attached to what you are doing.
Brad Bird
He’s a pagan! I’m an artist! We’re naturally sympathetic!
Sidney Howard
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.
Rita Mae Brown
He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.
Peter S Beagle
All good work requires self-revelation.
Sidney Lumet
Creativity is a continual surprise.
Ray Bradbury
That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
Ray Bradbury
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take the
Jim Jarmusch
Doors are for people with no imagination.
Derek Landy
The world won't end with a bang or a whimper. It'll end with the death screams of a thousand demons and a defiant, carefree, savage, wolfen howl.
Darren Shan
If mankind's destined to bite the bullet, let's bite it and be damned.
Darren Shan
I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!
Ian McEwan
Which side was I on? There was no time to search for answers. All I could do now was ride on a werewolf's back, toward a destiny as hidden as the dark side of the moon.
Neal Shusterman
Walk any path in Destiny's garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.
Neil Gaiman
When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers.
Steven Pressfield
My mother can't have been magic, or she wouldn't have died", said Riddle
J.K. Rowling
A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
Cormac McCarthy
There are no accidents in this world, that no living being is seduced into an entanglement that he did not invite with his innermost desires. Would you agree with my estimation?
Karen Essex
He is holding a book.Inside the book is the Universe.
Neil Gaiman
Everything since the beginning of time was working together to make my happiness possible: and then you. You walked into the audiovisual lab in your flannel shirt...and you fucked it up! You fucked everything up! Do you understand that? Because of you, the entire universe is ruined...forever!"--Kari, The Pavilion
Craig Wright
That felt strange. How sharp a rent a handful of moments made in the fabric of a life.
Guy Gavriel Kay
So you believe in fate,” I say.Dr. Mann pauses thoughtfully before answering. “I believe each of us was uniquely created for a specific purpose designed by the Creator, and that, because of that, there are certain things in our lives that we are destined by Him to do. The rest, I think, is soft clay: left entirely to the defining influences of choice, chance, and circumstance. And luck! Don’t forget luck.
Lauren Miller
When fate connects an invisible thread between a man and a woman who are bound to be together, no matter how hard they try to fight against their own destiny, they can’t change what’s meant to be.
Nino Varsimashvili
I know genes are a big deal, son, but they're not the be-all and end-all." Rob slowed to a halt at the lights, wishing the dickhead behind would back off. "If they were, you'd be in a seafood salad and I'd be in prison.
Karen Traviss
Those who don't know history are destined to be tyrannized by it
Dean Cavanagh
Luck comes and goes; you have to seize it. Bad luck comes and goes; it must be overcome. But I will never, never sit at the side of the road showing my wounds and shouting, 'It's destiny'!
Jean Van Hamme
There's a time when a man needs to fight and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny's lost, the ship has sailed and that only a fool will continue. The truth is I've always been a fool.
John August