Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 2

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
Ray Bradbury
people tell you so much more when they know you're just about to be dead . and then they talk around you, when you are.
Neil Gaiman
I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but safety first!
J.K. Rowling
but laugh, laugh, laugh, because if you ever stop laughing, it might just tear you apart
Neal Shusterman
We can't know if we laugh at ourselves for being silly or to forget that we're not and that we are still here only by a sufferance that can be no more predicted than appeased. Like most things, probably a little of both.
Brian McGreevy
Some men laugh easily. It makes them winning dinner companions.
Joe Abercrombie
Moshe was an Israeli with an ear-slitting laugh. He used it in the same way as a madman uses a gun, spraying it around with bewildering randomness.
Alex Garland
You think Bernadette Maguire killed him?”“Uh… no. She’s, like I said, she’s old.”“Old people can kill people too.”“I know, but…”“She could be a ninja.”“She’s not a ninja, for God’s sake. She’s somebody’s great grandmother.”“I want you to think carefully about this, Kenny. Have you ever seen her with a sword?”“What?”“How about throwing stars?”“This is ridiculous.”“Have you ever seen her dressed up as a ninja? That would have been my first clue.”The girl sucked in her cheeks so she wouldn't laugh out loud.
Derek Landy
You know," he said, his voice making me feel cold in spite of the heat, "this city can get ahold of you and pull you back no matter how hard you try to climb out. Like a grave.
Neal Shusterman
Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.
Neil Gaiman
It's a strange city... filled with things that are not obvious.
A.M. Homes
Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.
Roald Dahl
Youth has become a class.
Roger Vadim
When a man of 40 falls in love with a girl of 20 it isn't her youth he is seeking but his own.
Lenore Coffee
Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
They're fancy talkers about themselves writers. If I had to give young writers advice I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.
Brian Moore
The most valuable gift I ever received was the gift of insecurity my father left us. My mother's love might not have prepared me for life the way my father's departure did. He forced us out on the road where we had to earn our bread.
Lillian Gish
Worry less about what other people think about you and more about what you think about them.
Fay Weldon
Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
Arthur Somers Roche
A worried man could borrow a lot of trouble with practically no collateral.
Helen Nielsen
I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life time for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain
Rita Mae Brown
Ambition is destruction only competence matters.
Jill Robinson
After fifty years of living it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth.
Thomas McGuane
It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.
Federico Fellini
Amateurs hope. Professionals work.
Garson Kanin
In a professional once engaged the performance of the job comes first.
Garson Kanin
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Harold Pinter
Is sex dirty? Only if it is done right.
Woody Allen
Most people coming out of war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort at the least and death at the other end ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes for a time others seem alien and frivolous.
Lillian Hellman
Human war has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions.
Robert Ardrey
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
It's our dreams that keep us going that separate us from the beasts. I wouldn't even want to live if I thought it was all just eating and sleeping and taking off my clothes.
Mary Chase
Virtue has its own reward but no sale at the box office.
Mae West
I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.
Nora Ephron
Lead me not into temptation I can find the way myself.
Rita Mae Brown
Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured.
Tom Stoppard
It's a simple formula: do your best and somebody might like it.
Dorothy Baker
The past with its pleasures its rewards its foolishness its punishments is there for each of us forever and it should be.
Lillian Hellman
The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.
Mary Pickford
Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?
Lillian Hellman
The city is a cultural invention enforcing on the citizen knowledge of his own nature. And this we do not like. That we are aggressive beings easily given to violence that we get along together because we must more than because we want to and that the brotherhood of man is about as far from reality today as it was two thousand years ago that reason's realm is small that we never have been and never shall be created equal that if the human being is perfectible he has so far exhibited few symptoms - all are considerations of man from which space tends to protect us.
Robert Ardrey
The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.
George Miller
I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.
Mae West
Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus a carnival a travelling troupe of acrobats storytellers dancers singers jugglers sideshow freaks lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.
Paddy Chayefsky
The school teacher is certainly underpaid as a child minder but ludicrously overpaid as an educator.
John Osborne
As soon as you find the key to success somebody always changes the lock.
Tracey Ullman
She's the kind of woman who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.
Mae West
Success is like a liberation or the first phase of a love affair.
Jeanne Moreau
I don't think success is harmful as so many people say. Rather I believe it indispensible to talent: if for nothing else than to increase the talent.
Jeanne Moreau
I am not the smartest or most talented person in the world but I succeeded because I keep going and going and going.
Sylvester Stallone
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word-politeness of the heart a gentleness of the spirit.
Emma Thompson
Progress always involves risks. You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first.
Frederick B. Wilcox
If you have the will to win you have achieved half your success if you don't you have achieved half your failure.
David V. A. Ambrose
Many people have the ambition to succeed they may even have a special aptitude for their job. And yet they do not move ahead. Why? Perhaps they think that since they can master the job there is no need to master themselves.
John Stevenson
I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam I looked into the soul of the boy next to me.
Woody Allen
I don't believe in God. Just try getting a plumber on the weekend.
Woody Allen
Society my dear is like salt water good to swim in but hard to swallow.
Arthur Stringer
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
Jeff Valdez