Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 12

Love hurts. There is nothing as painful as heartbreak. But in order to learn to love again, you must learn to trust again.
Nicholas Sparks
There's nothing more stubborn than a fact. That is why you hate them so much. They offend you.
Tom Rob Smith
The quickest way to run out of time is to think you have enough of it,
Stewart Stafford
...there’s few on Earth as can cut a man deeper than his childless wife.
Craig Russell
And so, as quietly as he had lived, he slipped out of town, leaving only a note behind:Well, that's that. I'm off, and if you don't believe I'm leaving, just count the days I'm gone. When you hear the phone not ringing, it'll be me that's not calling. Goodbye, old girl, and good luck.Yours truly,Earl AdcockP.S. I'm not deaf.
Fannie Flagg
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
A man can own a woman or a man can own a knife, but no man can own both.
George R.R. Martin
Then don't. I can't help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would have never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and sheild it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
Cormac McCarthy
I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.
Elmore Leonard
One of my father's RULES FOR LIFE was to marry a woman who was smarter than you. "I did this," he would say to me, "and you should do it, too. I say, why do all the thinking?
Nicholas Sparks
[Will Turner] "You didn't beat me. You ignored the rules of engagement."[Captain Jack Sparrow] "...that's not much incentive for me to fight fair then is it?
Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio
Once the state starts providing, it feels free to hand out the rules, too!" Larch blurted hastily. ..."In a better world..." she began patiently."No, not in a better world!" he cried. "In this one--in this world. I take this world as a given. Talk to me about this world!" ..."Oh, I can't always be right," Larch said tiredly."Yes, I know," Nurse Caroline said sympathetically. "It's because even a good man can't always be right that we need a society, that we need certain rules--call them priorities, if you prefer," she said. ...Always in the background of his mind, there was a newborn baby crying... And they were not crying to be born, he knew; they were crying because they were born.
John Irving
On the battlefield there are no rules.
Joe Abercrombie
Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.
Neil Gaiman
Never show anger at slight,Tell nothing.Earn Respect from everyone by deeds,not Words.Respect the members of your Blood Family.Gambling was Recreation,Not a way to earn a Living.Love your Father,your Mother,your Sister but beware of Loving any other Woman than your Wife.And a Wife was a woman who bore your Children.And once that happened to You,your Life was Forfeit to give them their daily bread
Mario Puzo
I like being brave well enough, but I will be a lazy coward again if you think that would be better.
Peter S Beagle
The only time a man can be brave is when he is afraid.
George R.R. Martin
We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
Ray Bradbury
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?
Ray Bradbury
If oppression produced saints, we’d want everyone to be oppressed.
Christopher Bram
Time is weird. That much is obvious. Sometimes I think everything happens at once, which is anything but obvious and even weirder. I feel sorry for people who brag about 'living in the moment'; they're like people who come into the cinema after the film has started or people who drink Diet Coke—they're missing out on the best part. I think time is like the dial on a radio. Most people like to settle on a station with a clear signal and no interference. But that doesn't mean you can't listen to two or even three stations at the same time; it doesn't mean synchrony is impossible. Until quite recently, people believed it was impossible for a universe to fit inside two atoms, but it fits. Why dismiss the idea that on time's radio you can listen to the entire history of humanity simultaneously?
Marcelo Figueras
Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!
J.K. Rowling
The rights of man are poor things beside the eyes of hungry children. Their hurts are keener than the soreness of injustice.
Richard Llewellyn
It is but another instance of injustice, Fray Felipe said. For twenty years we, of the missions, have been subjected to it, and it grows. The sainted Junipero Serra invaded this land when other men feared, and at San Diego de Alcala he built the first mission of what became a chain, thus giving an empire to the world. Our mistake was that we prospered. We did the work, and others reap the advantages. They began taking out mission-lands from us, lands we had cultivated, which had formed a wilderness and which my brothers had turned into gardens and orchards. They robbed us of worldly goods. And not content with that they now are persecuting us. The mission-empire is doomed, caballero. The time is not far distant when mission roofs will fall in and walls crumble away. Some day people will look at the ruins and wonder how such a thing could come to pass.
Johnston McCulley
I’ve been washing stairs my whole life. One day after the other. Since I was five years old. I’ve never complained. Shame on you. I’m embarrassed to have a son like you…can’t even look after his own bicycle. You just wait until your dad comes home. Then you’ll be in trouble, I can tell you that much.”Poul-Erik’s MotherThe Informer
Steen Langstrup
I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me.
Gillian Flynn
Mom could make small things seem miraculous. That was her talent.
Matthew Quick
I'm a mother," said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, "and I know what I know.
Neil Gaiman
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.
Ben Aaronovitch
Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.
Federico Fellini
The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.
Mike Figgis
In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.
Sidney Lumet
I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.
Michael Haneke
The varying physical characteristics of the actors may also necessitate changes. Sean Connery is six feet four. Dustin Hoffman isn't.
Sidney Lumet
Today’s youngsters will unfortunately never know the thrills we experienced dubbing movies in the era of Rashomon.
Teruyo Nogami
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
Paul Auster
Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
Robert Bresson
You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
The most interesting of the classic movie genres to me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the Frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in the East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by the masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.
Martin Scorsese
The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.
Stanley Kubrick
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
Billy Wilder
I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.
David Cronenberg
How may a mortal, face and defeat the Kraken
Beverley Cross
But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.
Deborah Moggach
Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
François Truffaut
Adolescence is a marketing tool.
Cameron Crowe
A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It's not about art or ideas. It's about working at something and making it come out right.
Paul Auster
The sad thing is that when movies like this fail, executives think that proves there's no audience for unusual, original pictures - because they think they've made one.
Roger Ebert
What is this film (Mirror) about?It is about a Man. No, not the particular man whose voice we hear from behind the screen, played by Innokentiy Smoktunovsky. It's a film about you, your father, your grandfather, about someone who will live after you and who is still "you". About a Man who lives on the earth, is a part of the earth and the earth is a part of him, about the fact that a man is answerable for his life both to the past and to the future. You have to watch this film simply, and listen to the music of Bach and the poems of Arseniy Tarkovsky; watch it as one watches the stars, or the sea, as one admires a landscape. There is no mathematical logic here, for it cannot explain what man is or what is the meaning of his life. (Sculpting in Time)
andrey tarkovsky
Filmmaking is akin to writing on water.
Val Lewton
Toni, you bring me luck. I'm gonna wear you like a charm.
Robert Rossen
But he meant beauty in the sense of its organic connection to the material. And this is the connection that, for me, separates true stylists from decorators. The decorators are easy to recognize. That's why critics love them so.
Sidney Lumet
I leave this as a declaration of intent, so no one will be confused. One: "Si vis pacem, para bellum." Latin. Boot Camp Sergeant made us recite it like a prayer. "Si vis pacem, para bellum - If you want peace, prepare for war." Two: Frank Castle is dead. He died with his family. Three: in certain extreme situations, the law is inadequate. In order to shame its inadequacy, it is necessary to act outside the law. To pursue... natural justice. This is not vengeance. Revenge is not a valid motive, it's an emotional response. No, not vengeance. Punishment.
Jonathan Hensleigh
[Luchino] Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe’s oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that’s the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.(...)He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that’s too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history.
Martin Scorsese
To think you cannot fight fate is only an act of surrender.
John Duigan
But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.
Akira Kurosawa
Forget it, Jake -- it's Chinatown.
Robert Towne