Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 149

I realize the thing about a guy you've spent your whole life loving from afar is that even though he's real you've really made most of him up.
Kirsten Smith
Everything else has vanished, so you take them now. Maybe if you're the one keeping them, I'll be the one feeling better.
Daniel Handler
Isn't everyone a part of everyone else?
Budd Schulberg
Everyone has their first date and the object is to hide your flaws. And then you're in a relationship, and it's all about hiding your disappointment. And then, once you're married, it's about hiding your sins.
Joss Whedon
Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.
J.K. Rowling
In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs
François Truffaut
Someone asked me about the difference between love and lust. Hmmm. That will take a little thought. How to tell the difference? Well, for guys, if she looks better AFTER you've made love to her than before, that might be love. If you find yourself itching to get out the door afterward, probably just lust, y'know?
Steven Barnes
Tanith frowned. Did people still go on DATES any more? She was sure they did. They probably called it something different though. She tried to think of the last date she'd been on. The last PROPER date. Did fighting side by side with Saracen Rue count as a date? They ended up snuggling under the moonlight, drenched in gore and pieces of brain - so it had PROBABLY been a date. If it wasn't, it was certainly a fun time had by all. Well, not ALL. But she and Saracen had sure had a blast.
Derek Landy
She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.
Stephen King
Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.
Stephen King
You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
Hanif Kureishi
When you've been around as long as me, Lucy, you'll know that there are three types of sex... One - brand-new, kitchen-table sex. Two - bedroom sex. Then number three - hallway sex, when you pass each other in the hallway and say 'Fuck you.'" - Lockie
Kathy Lette
There’s nothing like that feeling of waiting for a guy. It’s the loneliest feeling in the world. Holding that cell phone in your hand as you take out the trash, use the bathroom, change the litter box. Fearful that the one second you aren’t looking will be when they call. Pathetic. And something I have done as recently as last week.
Hilary Winston
All's fair in love and war," said Ron brightly, "and this is a bit of both.
J.K. Rowling
There was no one to be seen so she gave in freely to her sobs as she made her way home, pressed her arms against her stomach; the pain lodged in there like an ill-tempered f
John Ajvide Lindqvist
It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.
Nick Hornby
My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.
Gillian Flynn
Theresa, I know there's a part of you that believes you can change someone, but the reality is that you can't. You can change yourself, and Garrett can change himself, but you can't do it for him.
Nicholas Sparks
I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.
Nick Hornby
Every couple has ups and downs, every couple argues, and that’s the thing—you’re a couple, and couples can’t function without trust.
Nicholas Sparks
A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.
Mae West
Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.
J.K. Rowling
I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?
Nicholas Sparks
Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?""Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.
Ray Bradbury
Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.
Mae West
It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
Nick Hornby
Every couple needs to argue now and then. Just to prove that the relationship is strong enough to survive. Long-term relationships, the ones that matter, are all about weathering the peaks and the valleys.
Nicholas Sparks
You’re never going to learn something as profoundly as when it’s purely out of curiosity.
Christopher Nolan
Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.
Neil Gaiman
Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars.But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all.To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want toget ahead.The truth is, you do
Brian Koppelman
When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.
Tom Stoppard
Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.
Roger Ebert
What I've found about it is that there are some folks you can talk to until you're blue in the face--they're never going to get it and they're never going to change. But every once in a while, you'll run into someone who is eager to listen, eager to learn, and willing to try new things. Those are the people we need to reach. We have a responsibility as parents, older people, teachers, people in the neighborhood to recognize that.
Tyler Perry
We get schooled by the people around us, and it stays inside us deep.
George Pelecanos
I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?
Richard Russo
Students never appreciate their teachers while they are learning. It is only later, when they know more of the world, that they understand how indebted they are to those who instructed them. Good teachers expect no praise or love from the young. They wait for it, and in time, it comes.
Darren Shan
She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?
Ian McEwan
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
I lack formal education. So I'm left with the feeling that I'm smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people—people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin—that they’d be bored as hell by me. It’s a lonely way to go through life.
Gillian Flynn
The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.
Ray Bradbury
Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.
Max Brooks
I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.
Ray Bradbury
I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.
Stanley Kubrick
Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.
Steven Spielberg
[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.
Jim Henson
Shonda, how do you do it all?The answer is this: I don't.Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life....That is the trade-off.That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel 100 percent okay, you never get your sea legs, you are always a little nauseous.
Shonda Rhimes
Serena's not worried her friend is gonna feel bad she's not as good at tennis as Serena is. You know why? Because in order to be as good as Serena, you have to decide that your goal is that NO ONE is going to be as good as you are at tennis.Then you have to make it true.
Shonda Rhimes
We experience [procrastination] as fear. But fear of what?Fear of the consequences of following our heart. Fear of bankruptcy, fear of poverty, fear of insolvency. Fear of groveling when we try to make it on our own, and of groveling when we give up and come crawling back to where we started. Fear of being selfish, of being rotten wives or disloyal husbands; fear of failing to support our families, of sacrificing their dreams for ours. Fear of betraying our race, our 'hood, our homies. Fear of failure. Fear of being ridiculous. Fear of throwing away the education, the training, the preparation that those we love have sacrificed so much for, that we ourselves have worked our butts off for. Fear of launching into the void, of hurtling too far out there; fear of passing some point of no return, beyond which we cannot recant, cannot reverse, cannot rescind, but must live with this cocked-up choice for the rest of our lives. Fear of madness. Fear of insanity. Fear of death.These are serious fears. But they're not the real fear. Not the master fear, the mother of all fears that's so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don't believe it.Fear That We Will Succeed.
Steven Pressfield
The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.
Moss Hart
character is not made in a crisis- it is only exhibited
Robert Freedman
Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.
David Mamet
Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve.
Julian Fellowes
I tell you, life is extraordinary. A few years ago I couldn’t write anything or sell anything, I’d passed the age where you know all the returns are in, I’d had my chance and done my best and failed. And how was I to know the miracle waiting to happen round the corner in late middle age? 84, Charing Cross Road was no best seller, you understand; it didn’t make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I’d lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.
Helene Hanff
You have to take your own bold approach, and if you do you will be rewarded with success. Or calamitous failure. That can happen too.
Steven Moffat
If at first you don't succeed, lower you expectations
Jonathan Tropper
Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.
Neil Gaiman
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Woody Allen
To be successful you need friends and to be very successful you need enemies.
Sidney Sheldon
The glass candle is meant to represent truth and learning, rare and beautiful and fragile things. It is made in the shape of a candle to remind us that a maester must cast light wherever he serve, and it is a sharp to remind us that knowledge can be dangerous.
George R.R. Martin
When you choose to look down on something, you render yourself incapable of understanding it.
Stewart Stafford