Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 119

Freud wrote that love involves the undervaluation of reality and the overvaluation of the desired object. While the correct valuation of a person is an odd, if not impossible idea, we might say Freud meant something like this: for various reasons, many of them masochistic, we become involved with others who cannot possibly give what we ask for; we can wait as long as we wish, but they do not have it, and one day, if we bear to abandon our fantasy and see clearly, we might face reality straight on. We will then look elsewhere for fulfillment, to a place where our needs can, in fact, be satisfied.
Hanif Kureishi
By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.
David Nicholls
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.― Stephen King, The Shining
Stephen King
Fantasy is a reaction to the constraints of reality.
Stewart Stafford
By swap news do you mean drink?" "I do, and that excessively.
Joe Abercrombie
Shall I prick my prick as well?
George R.R. Martin
The day will come when you need them to respect you, even fear you a little. Laughter is poison to fear.
George R.R. Martin
Greatness, Master, is generally only considered enough if you are the greatest.
Jessica O'Toole
Do only the greatest good, for the greatest number of people. They will do the rest.
Jessica O'Toole
I wish this world had none of it. That we were all bound only by the matter around us and the dreams in our hearts. But it does, and we are all slave to it, unless we give the challenge. What is the point of possessing the power you have if not to use it for the greatest good you hold so dear? And why do you think that goodness exists in doing nothing, rather than trying something you’re uncertain of?
Jessica O'Toole
He spun round under her grip. She smelled so good, her touch so soft as she unhooked the buttons on his tunic. Pushing the shirt apart she frowned, her hands running over the thin scars through his tattoos. ‘And you belong to him, too.
Jessica O'Toole
One of the tribes of Lisser, Kisera, has a saying. "Tra ulea keyē milyenura keyē gryētu - you only live on through that which you leave." You have to leave something for others to remember.' She gazed at his solemn face, pulling the cord of her cloak open, grasping half the heavy material and launching it over his shoulders. He pulled it further until in encompassed them both. Then she did something both of them were surprised at - she slid her hand into his. ‘And you will.
Jessica O'Toole
Something stirred within him that was new, dangerous. The question of whether that was wise. ‘Sure.
Jessica O'Toole
So now you're on the run,' Warrick said wistfully. 'Travelling the Dark Highway, a lone wolf. With your friend, who is another wolf. Two lone wolves. Two wolves, really. Not really alone. Two wolves in a car. Travelling. One of them naked and bloody. The other with her ass hanging out.
Derek Landy
The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.
Ray Bradbury
You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve
J.K. Rowling
Memories sharp enough to cut himself on - the smells, the sounds, the feel of the air on his skin, the desperate hope and mad anger.
Joe Abercrombie
Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think. Also, I subscribed to a number of learned journals.
Neil Gaiman
The memories of our glories fade, and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard's lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened.
Joe Abercrombie
Men are brittle, I reckon. They don't bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.
Joe Abercrombie
Monza never had understood why getting out a tit or two made for a better painting. But painters seemed to think it did, so tits is what you got.
Joe Abercrombie
The writing of fantasy is best left to those who have nothing better to do, as is indicated by the fairy tales of otherwise gifted writers like Robert Graves and John Ciardi. It isn't so much the difficulty of doing it right, without falling off the tightrope into the cold pits of allegory or mindless whimsy‌—‌the weary thing is that even if you bring it off, all you've done is write a fantasy, and so what? Life is dangerous, and escapism has become a dirty word. I feel the same way, being a child of my own critical times. I'd write the other stuff, the real books, if I could. Plenty nitty-gritty. If I could.
Peter S Beagle
Only in this world of topsy-turvy attitudes could outright stupidity, such as I had displayed, be something that got me high marks. I had an amused glimmering of a notion at that point: If I ever turned out to be a complete and utter fool, I could wind up running the whole kingdom. It was something to consider.
Peter David
Some time later, I sat in the wine cellar, staring at the walls while cradling a wineskin in my lap like a child, murmuring over and over as if lulling the child to sleep, 'I am shat upon. I am shat upon'.
Peter David
Youth believes itself immortal. There is a cure for such an attitude, but unfortunately it is a cure from which one never recovers.
Peter David
In retrospect, I would have to recommend against epiphanies. They are difficult on an emotional level, and they also sometimes move you to foolish and inopportune acts, which was what happened in my case.
Peter David
Unfortunately, the world does not always act in a manner consistent with one's plans for it.
Peter David
I guess it really had been brave . . . because it was so bugger-all stupid, and if there was one thing I'd come to realize, ti was that bravery and bugger-all stupidity went hand in hand.
Peter David
I remember so many things [. . .] The problem is, only half of them are true . . . and the half which is true keeps changing places with the half which is false.
Peter David
It seemed to me that, no matter what endeavor I was involved in, I was to be something of a sham.
Peter David
It is said, once a wise man from the far North told me; it is said that there are in certain parts of Scandinavia cities within cities like there are circles within circles; existent yet invisible. And those cities are inhabited by creatures more terrible than imagination can create : man-shaped but man-devouring, as black and as silent as the night they prowl in.
Johanna Sinisalo
All people are, at heart, egocentric. We exist at the center of our own little universes. We believe that we are living out our lives as best we can, and that we have our own sphere of influence which exists of both friends and enemies. They in turn have their own friends and enemies with whom they interact. That is a given. But we, each of us, tend to put ourselves ahead of others because we believe that we are significant. We must attend to our own needs, desires, wants, and aspirations, because each of us is our own greatest priority. No one else cares for us as much as we do, no one else can exist in our skin. We think we're important. It is where our sense of self-worth comes up, where our egos reside, where "we" are. And we believe that each of our lives means something.
Peter David
Apropos, you're going to have to learn to sooner or later that you can't just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn't be.
Peter David
Lack of movement is a formidable force to overcome.
Peter David
There are some for whom the good of mankind is their primary concern, and others who basically put their own considerations before everyone else. I was among the latter.
Peter David
Noblest. Bravest. What rot. There was no bravery in buying oneself out of difficulty.
Peter David
And when his head slumped forward into his book, she giggled, for she knew that he was hers.
C. Robert Cargill
Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond.
George R.R. Martin
enter the world of things as they are
Neil Gaiman
But some, a very come to the gods all on their own They find their way—long and far it is, sometimes—and they wander up to the altars, shy and clumsy and embarrassed and alone, and when they can get the words out, they say, 'Well. Here I am
Peter S Beagle
All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.
Neil Gaiman
There was a moment of hesitation, and then her mouth opened against his, and her tongue slid into his mouth, and he was, under the strange stars, utterly, irrevocably lost.
Neil Gaiman
A book can be as dangerous as a sword in the right hands
George R.R. Martin
I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.I know a charm that will heal with a touch.I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy.I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks.A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it.A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it.An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore.For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again.An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes.A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.A fifteenth: I had a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe in my dreams.A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one know but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.
Neil Gaiman
Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.
Neil Gaiman
Sirius was a brave, clever, and energetic man, and such men are not usually content to sit at home in hiding while they believe others to be in danger.
J.K. Rowling
Down is up, up is down. Good is Wicked, Wicked is Good. The times are changing. This is what Oz has come to.
Danielle Paige
I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they're always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.
Ray Bradbury
Most of my kin are bastards," [Tyrion] said with a wry smile, "but you're the first I've had to friend.
George R.R. Martin
When single shines the triple sun,What was sundered and undoneShall be whole, the two made oneBy Gelfling hand, or else by none.
Jim Henson
[We let] the universality of fantasy, of once upon a time, allow escapist fiction to be more than just that - to also bring us home.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Here's a thought. You answer what I ask and I keep not killing you." - Antiope Flint - DREAMNASIUM
Geoffrey Thorne
Answer me immediately or I'll start cutting away everything that's pretty on you...and then put it back.
Richard Finney
You retain the Ki. Whether or not you become a warrior is for you to discover.
Richard Finney
You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.
Neil Gaiman
A set of huge marble busts stared smugly down from on high: great merchants and financiers of Styrian history, by the look of them. Criminals made heroes by colossal success.
Joe Abercrombie
Are you entirely sure of that knot?' asked Morveer. 'There is no place in the plan for a lengthy drop'.'Twenty-eight strides', said Friendly.'What?''The drop'.A brief pause, 'That is not helpful'.
Joe Abercrombie
For men, the answer was always the same and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.
George R.R. Martin
But I don't think Art's an Einstein - he likes tugging ears, biting people and burping too much to be a genius.
Darren Shan
It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these
Neil Gaiman