Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 13

Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows . It's a very mean and nasty place, and I don't care how tough you are , it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that.
Sylvester Stallone
Certain directors and actors were constantly preoccupied by one problem, and apparently, one only. This was connected with the so-called German greeting, which was the method of hailing a friend by raising the right arm straight out with the hand extended at, or slightly above, the level of the shoulder. This greeting had very definite political implications; it was employed daily by millions; and the directors and actors saw no reason why it should not be one on the films in a simple and life-like fashion. They failed. Even when shown in the rushes the effect on the select and professional audience was simply to produce uncontrollable hilarity. The cinema can do a great deal. It can entrance, t can tell fairy tales, it can be realistic or surrealistic -- but it cannot portray a gesture that is false without underlining the most brutal way its basic falseness. The German cinema could not reproduce the German greeting; it was the greeting that was to blame, not the cinema.
Ernst von Salomon
A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.
Jean Renoir
No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.
Roger Ebert
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.
Robert Bresson
The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.
Ed McBain
It's tough, man. Unless it's a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that's all the studios are even doing. They've kind of admitted they're not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you're out of the league, you're done.
Richard Linklater
We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Film lovers are sick people.
François Truffaut
I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
Peter Greenaway
I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much; my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold onto it. And then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude—for every single moment of my stupid, little life. You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure; but don’t worry….you will someday.
Alan Ball
i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.
Jean-Luc Godard
I wish I’d done everything on Earth with you.
Baz Luhrmann
It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.
Roger Ebert
Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out
Martin Scorsese
I hate this complete obsession with class, especially at this place, you can hardly say 'hello' to anyone before they are getting all prolier-than-thou and telling you about how their dad's a one eyed chimney-sweep with rickets, and how they've still got an outside loo, and have never been on a plane or whatever, all that dubious crap, most of which is usually lies anyway, and I'm thinking why are you telling me this? Am I meant to feel guilty? D'you think it's my fault or something, or are you just feeling pleased with yourself for escaping your pre-determined social role or some self congratulatory bullshit? I mean, what does it matter anyway? People are people, if you ask me, and they rise or fall by their own talents and merits, and their own labours, and blaming the fact they've got a settee rather than a sofa, or eat tea rather tan dinner, that's just an excuse, it's just whining self-pity and shoddy thinking.... I don;t make judgements about other people because of their background and I expect people to treat me with the same courtesy... It's my parent's moeny and its not as if they got it from nicking people's dole or running sweatshops in Johannesburg or something. They worked fucking hard for what they've got. It's a privilege and they treat it as such and they do their best to give something back. But if you ask me, theres no snob like an inverted snob... Im just so fucking bored of people trying to pass plain old envy off as some sort of virtue.
David Nicholls
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
Gore Vidal
Do either of you even play baseball?
Jeff Davis
Hayden shouts, "To the new Teen Uprising!
Neal Shusterman
This is 1987. A girl can be whatever she wants to be." "I know," said Ray. "My mums a plumber.
David Bischoff
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
You know you've got problems when your head is hanging over the toilet, puking up your dinner, and what you're thinking of is your dad. And how he thinks you're not pretty.
Teresa Lo
There's maybe nothing nicer than somebody just coming straight out and showing you they like you.
Tim Federle
Do you enjoy holidays with your family? I don't mean your mom and dad family, but your uncle and aunt and cousin family? Personally, I do. There are several reasons for this. First, I am very interested and fascinated by how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other. Second, the fights are always the same.
Stephen Chbosky
My grandfather was crying. The kind of quiet that is quiet and a secret. The kind of crying that only I noticed. I thought about him going into my mom's room when she was little and hitting my mom and holding up her report card and saying that her bad grades would never happen again. And I think now that maybe he meant my older brother. Or my sister. Or me. That he would make sure that he was the one to work in a mill. I don't know if that's good or bad. I don't know if it's better to have your kids be happy and not go to college. I don't know if it's better to be close with your daughter or make sure she has a better life than you do. I just don't know.
Stephen Chbosky
But in that moment when my brother took the field, all that washed away, and everyone was proud... I looked up at my dad, and he was smiling. I looked at my mom, and she was smiling even though she was nervous about my brother getting hurt, which was strange because it was a VCR tape of an old game, and she knew he didn't get hurt.
Stephen Chbosky
When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe's answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn't a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house not a magnificent home.
Dennis Lehane
As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.
Neil Gaiman
Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point. Will you listen to me, just for once? The debate does not matter. It's not about the issues. Albie might have been naive or ridiculous or pompous or all of those things, but you apologized. You said you were embarassed by him. You took the side of a bunch of arms-dealers! Bloddy bastard arms-dealers against your son - our son - and that was wrong, it was the wrong thing to do, because in a fight you side with the people you love. That's just how it is.
David Nicholls
He might be a genius, but that did not make him a leader
Kirsten Beyer
Give Bethod a kick from me, once you have him under your boot.""That I will, unless he gets me under his.""Never easy, kicking upwards.
Joe Abercrombie
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.
Stephen King
Think I have made a terrible mistake going to college. Have decided to become a shepherd and spend my days tending to flocks of goats
Scott Frost
And what makes humans so sure that thinking is the most important activity in the universe?...I on the contrary have never forgotten that first I existed and then, with a lot of difficulty, I learned to think." (p. 31)
Sabina Berman
The Master: The cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about.
Terrance Dicks
They are talking like fools. They are saying that two and two make nothing. They are saying that a man will have to die to in order to protect his life. If you agree to fight you agree to die. Now if you die to protect your life you aren't alive anyhow so how is there any sense in a thing like that? A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving. He doesn't say I will spend all my money in order to save money. He doesn't say I will burn my house to down in order to keep it from burning. Why then should he be willing to die for the privilege of living?
Dalton Trumbo
That's ridiculous. The only point in having enemies is so you can defeat them, kill them, brush them aside.""Or give them a chance to redeem themselves.
Derek Landy
I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.
Cormac McCarthy
A man who lies about beer makes enemies
Stephen King
He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.
Cormac McCarthy
Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.
Neil Gaiman
Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.
Tom Stoppard
The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.
Paul Auster
So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.
Roger Ebert
Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency.
Eric Ambler
Now, watching her sleep, and closing his eyes, he felt, in this particular intimacy - stowed beneath her duvet - that he was intruding. At the same time, he knew, settling down, you couldn´t dislike anyone you'd seen sleep
Hanif Kureishi
Yet velvet curtains, soft cheese, compelling work and boys who can run full-tilt—it isn't enough. And if it isn't, it isn't. There's no living with that. The world is made from our imagination; our eyes enliven it, as our hands give it shape. Wanting makes it thrive; meaning is what you put in, not what you extract. You only see what you are inclined to see, and no more. We have to make the new.
Hanif Kureishi
I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?
Hanif Kureishi
I can only think how good life on earth can be, at times. What grief two people can give to one another! And what pleasure!
Hanif Kureishi
My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.
Hanif Kureishi
Dear God, teach me to be careless.
Hanif Kureishi
...they knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways; then the offender - it had happened twice since their arrival - became irritated by the cloying susceptibilities of the other, and they would continue to explore the twisting alleyways and sudden squares in silence, and with each step the city would recede as they locked tighter into each other's presence.
Ian McEwan
And then like a song we'd forgotten was even on the mix, you stepped into the house and my whole life.
Daniel Handler
The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.
Neil Gaiman
Oh ... My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.
Neil Gaiman
I had this dream, see, where I saw the whole world melt. I was standing on La Cienega and from there I could see the whole world and it was melting and it was just so strong and realistic like. And so I thought, Well, if this dream comes true, how can I stop it, you know? How can I change things, you know? So I thought if I, like pierced my ear or something, like alter my physical image, dye my hair, the world wouldn't melt. So I dyed my hair and this pink lasts. I like it. It lasts. I don't feel like the world is gonna melt anymore.
Bret Easton Ellis
They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened Exodus (1960) screenplay
Dalton Trumbo
She had locked something away,something deep inside.A truth that she had once known,but chose to forget.And she couldn't break free.So I decided to search for it.I went deep into the recess of her mindand found that secret place.And I broke in..
Christopher J. Nolan
The generation that bought the most shoes and crippled the moral footing
Dean Cavanagh