Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 130

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of w
Nora Ephron
A living poem" had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.
Nicholas Sparks
Ladies who play with fire must remember that smoke gets in their eyes.
Mae West
Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.
Gillian Flynn
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
Nora Ephron
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
Mae West
I'm no model lady. A model's just an imitation of the real thing.
Mae West
There are no good girls gone wrong - just bad girls found out.
Mae West
The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you, but your momma does and so do I.
Stephen King
A mob always picked its own leaders, and it always picked the right ones.
Stephen King
The idea of parts of the body public fighting each other was like the idea of a man's punching himself in the face. It was a physical blasphemy that suited this era as an index of how far it had all gone.
Paul Cornell
IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TURN ON ANY TELEVISION ON ANY SUNDAY MORNING - FIND ONE OF THOSE HOLY ROLLERS: THAT'S HIM, THAT'S THE NEW MISTER PRESIDENT! AND DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF ALL THOSE KIDS WHO ARE GOING TO FALL IN THE CRACKS OF THIS GREAT, BIG, SLOPPY SOCIETY OF OURS? I JUST MET HIM; HE'S A TALL, SKINNY, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED "DICK." HE'S PRETTY SCARY. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM IS NOT UNLIKE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TV EVANGELIST - OUR FUTURE PRESIDENT. WHAT'S WRONG WITH BOTH OF THEM IS THAT THEY'RE SO SURE THEY'RE RIGHT! THAT'S PRETTY SCARY - THE FUTURE, I THINK, IS PRETTY SCARY.
John Irving
Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.
Stephen King
The only way to ensure democracy functions correctly is to question its governance constantly. Fail to do so and you may awake to find yourself living in a police state.
Stewart Stafford
I do know a few things, actually. I know you have rather backwards laws about relations with non-magic people. That you're not mean to befriend them, that you can't marry them, which seems mildly absurd to me.
J.K. Rowling
Foreigners are mystified by the whole business while thoughtful Americans – there are several of us – are equally mystified that the ruling establishment of the country has proved to be so mindlessly vindictive that it is willing, to be blunt, to overthrow the lawful government of the United States – that is, a president elected in 1992 and reelected in 1995 by We the People, that sole source of all political legitimacy, which takes precedence over the Constitution and the common law and God himself.
Gore Vidal
Great leaders lead by example, not by making an example of others.
Stewart Stafford
It'll be an unholy muddle, that's for sure," he was saying. "Me and Hardin and Baker all with our claws out for the same seat. The thing will have to be done carefully or we'll end up with out tidy little Whig house divided.""Why don't you take turns?""It's worth thinking about, but no matter how much you'd like politics to be a cotillion it just naturally wants to be a dirt fight.
Stephen Harrigan
We're roughage," Tyger said. "If we don't cause a little intestinal distress, no one knows we're there.
Neal Shusterman
I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.
George MacDonald Fraser
When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and—possibly—the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires.We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)
Marcelo Figueras
It is ironic-rouse the limpest adjective-that a government as spontaneously tyrannous and callous as ours should, over the years, have come yo care so much about our health as it endlessly tests and retests commercial drugs available in other lands while arresting those who take "hard" drugs on the potential ground that they are bad for the user's health. One is touched by their concern- touched and dubious. After all, these same compassionate guardians of our well-being have sternly, year in and year out, refused to allow us to have what every other First World country simply takes for granted, a national health service.
Gore Vidal
James Reston, Jr.: You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes, great complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.
Peter Morgan
You know your vote doesn't count, but you go through the motions, because it's been drummed into your head that you might be the one person who makes a difference.
Marshall Karp
he'd never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion on the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they this weilded "power" barbarically so the world would not find them out
Dennis Lehane
Jim Reston: And of course when that moment came--no words came to my mouth, and I shook his hand. Because if you've spent that long hating a man--in the end--a kind of relationship develops. An intimacy. Biographer and subject. Assassin and target.
Peter Morgan
Humans elect leaders on the basis of the promises they make. We [vampires] try to elect ours based solely on the strength of their character.
Darren Shan
Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.
Peter Morgan
Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.
Robert McKee
Dear Bill (O'Reilly)...I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!
Roger Ebert
You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.
David Nicholls
If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt -- and fueled even more than Hollywood by money -- if that's possible.
Ben Affleck
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Gore Vidal
Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.
Stephen King
But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of any other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, no, search your soul, lovie--is the vampire so bad?
Richard Matheson
There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.
Gore Vidal
I honestly see the battle between Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative as the exact same dynamic--there's a group of people in this world that don't like conflict and care about what other people are going through, and then there's this other group of people in the world who hate that. 'Suck it up, man, we're not coddling you, take care of yourself, what's your problem?' It's jocks versus geeks, and I've always referred to life as perpetual high school because it never stops.
Paul Feig
And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.
Stephen King
As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
Gore Vidal
Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get...
Raymond Chandler
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal
the difference between a rebel and a patriot depends upon who is in power at the moment.
Sidney Sheldon
No". Tyrion's voice was hoarse. "Sansa is no longer yours to torment. Understand that, monster." Joffrey sneered. "You're the monster, Uncle" "Am I?" Tyrion cocked his head. "Perhaps you should speak more softly to me, then. Monsters are dangerous beasts, and just now kinds seem to be dying like flies.
George R.R. Martin
See, because being Cool is obviously the most important thing on earth. It's more important than getting a job, or having a girlfriend, or political power, or money, because all those things are predicated by Coolness. They happen because of it. They depend on it.
Ned Vizzini
He was a poet who sometimes taught Free University classes or travelled in the western states of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, speaking to high school English classes, stunning middle-class boys and girls (he hoped) with the news that poetry was alive—narcoleptic, to be sure, but still possessed of a certain hideous vitality.
Stephen King
For God’s sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sunblock is to the skin during the heat of the summer. You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smart-ass psychologist will question your ability to even do that.
Stephen King
All this and the wine's coming in and out, and by the time the waiters set the espressos down Callan’s about half in the bag. He watches Calabrese take a long sip from an espresso cup. Then the boss says, 'Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.' One motherfuck of an essay question. 
Don Winslow
All this and the wines coming in and out, and by the time the waiters set the espressos down Callan’s about half in the bag. He watches Calabrese take a long sip from an espresso cup. Then the boss says, 'Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.' One motherfuck of an essay question. 
Don Winslow
A sword needs a sheath, heh, and a wedding needs a bedding.
George R.R. Martin
Life is a windowless room in the Hotel Bellevue.
Victoria Wood
Yes. She’s correct. We’re not friends. We are lufenes actually. But she’s had an overdose of magic, which has seemingly rendered her empathetically impotent.
Jessica O'Toole
Spike: Bloody hell, woman, you're cutting off my circulation!Buffy: You don't have any circulation.Spike: Well, it pinches
Joss Whedon
The house in the story is based on my friend Tori's house in Kinsale, Ireland, which is obviously not actually haunted, and the sound of people upstairs moving wardrobes around when you are downstairs there and alone is probably just something that old houses do when they think they are unobserved.
Neil Gaiman
While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue.
Leslie Charteris
Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis —he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land.
Ben Aaronovitch
Hecate dresses in all black, is extremely pale, unearthly beautiful and has the most chilling eyes I’ve ever known. All in all, she comes across as one of ‘The Walking Dead’ – except alive and far prettier!
Adele Rose
The library could be summed up in three words – enormous, ancient and dusty – extremely dusty. It was exactly like those magnificent libraries you more or less see in every gothic movie. What’s more, I was thankful that I was not an asthmatic, for this was most definitely their form of hell.
Adele Rose
So much for a “Happy Halloween!” I thought sarcastically. I should wear a huge sign around my neck from now onwards that reads: ‘Stay clear of me if you want your party to survive the night’!
Adele Rose
Soon, they actually began to titter on their toes as they glared at me, looking more like an army of angry wasps than ever before. All they needed now were matching yellow and black jumpers and pretend stingers!
Adele Rose
How could they have forgotten the importance of today’s date? My brain screamed at me as, with shaking fingers, I climbed the stairs to the bus, before making my way to the back, out of sight. My birthday, like the norm, happens on the same date every year. Therefore, the confused part of my brain argued, how could they have all simply forgotten this fact and acted so “normal” when I entered the kitchen this morning? They may have been abducted by aliens in the night? This was a voice from the incomprehensible area of my mind. Consequently, their behaviour would make complete sense then! Furthermore, answered another voice from the same ridiculous compartment, they could’ve simply gone to bed last night fine and then awoken the next morning with amnesia? Sometimes, these things happen unexpectedly. Adele Rose, Awakening.
Adele Rose