Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 30

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children that will never be born (the last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already).
Dalton Trumbo
How could you believe or disbelieve anything anymore? Four maybe five million men killed and none of them wanting to die while hundreds maybe thousands were left crazy or blind or crippled and couldn’t die no matter how hard they tried.
Dalton Trumbo
Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.
Neil Gaiman
My first rule of war, Cat-never give the enemy his wish
George R.R. Martin
The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it's ripe. and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightening storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of man's having a life of his own, apart from whatever life he has with his family, a private life that no one knows anything about, "a place he can be himself without concern of disappointment or rejection".
A.M. Homes
If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?
Neil Gaiman
We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us." "You're joking.""Wish I was.
Neil Gaiman
I went home and tried to sleep, but couldn't, so I stared up at the moon, watching how it's trailing edge faded into darkness, so close to being full, but not quite there. A pregnant moon, Grandma called it. Full almost to bursting, and ready to give birth to something unthinkable.
Neal Shusterman
That’s the moon,’ I said.‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock.‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.’‘Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,’ said Lettie. ‘And you don’t trip on the stairs.
Neil Gaiman
Rose, the moon is incredible. Everything down on Earth relies on it. Rats jump for it. Tides rush out from it. Humans kiss under it. Without it there'd be nothing down there worth the light. And that just happened by chance -trillions of odd against it- one bit of stardust meets another bit of dust.
Gareth Roberts
You’re a dreamer, boy,” he said. “Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it’s nevergoing to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don’t give a damn about money, and you’retoo much of a philosopher to have any feeling for art. What am I going to do with you? You needsomeone to look after you, to make sure you have food in your belly and a bit of cash in your pocket.Once I’m gone, you’ll be right back where you started.
Paul Auster
The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife.
George R.R. Martin
The lovelorn came, too. The alone. The lunatics-they were brought here, sometimes. Got their name from the moon, it was only fair the moon had a chance to fix things.
Neil Gaiman
Never drink with Dornishmen when the moon is full.
George R.R. Martin
Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning.'He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable. 'And if you look'—she nodded at the sky—'there's a man on the moon.'He hadn't looked for a long time.
Ray Bradbury
Since nothing is free, to each his price.
Gore Vidal
My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.
Ben Aaronovitch
I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the East River on an oil-slick, garbage infested midnight. I turn about on my own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought me to light. I am a serum born of venoms. I am the antibody of all Time. I am the Cure. You do of the City, do you not? Manhattan is your punisher, let me be you shield.
Ray Bradbury
My darling," she said at last, are you sure you don't mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?""I don't mind at all" I said.It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.
Roald Dahl
A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")
Ray Bradbury
This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson--or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter--has come up with.
Bret Easton Ellis
I am the Thomas Edison of conversational stupidity.
Jesse Andrews
Is that gallantry I smell, or just stupidity? The two scents are much alike, as I recall.
George R.R. Martin
Honestly, if you were any slower, you’d be going backward.
J.K. Rowling
Longbottom, if brains were gold, you'd be poorer than Weasley, and that's saying something.
J.K. Rowling
Subjective storytelling is now almost as common in the news media as it is in feature films, TV dramas, novels or theater shows. Journalists at their worst are self-centered storytellers who either knowingly or unknowingly bend truths into stories that match their personal beliefs or those of their employers.
Lance Morcan
A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?
Gore Vidal
Manipulating the media is akin to poisoning a nation’s water supply – it affects all of our lives in unimaginable ways.
Lance Morcan
Unfortunately, mainstream news has become infotainment, sharing more in common with the entertainment industry than with traditional journalism. Gossip, characterizations and injections of drama are subtly infused with facts, altering the truth in a similar way to how dramatists twist true stories to create greater excitement.
Lance Morcan
The media, like anything else, can be bought. Everything, it seems, has its price. Even the free press.
Lance Morcan
Traditional journalism, where reporters deliver information in a balanced and unbiased fashion, is rapidly fading into obscurity. This is especially evident on television where high profile reporters become bigger than the story, delivering news with large dollops of personality and wit – almost as if they are actors.
Lance Morcan
Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing
Robert Bresson
Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.
Max Brooks
The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
Ray Bradbury
The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'.
Ray Bradbury
The news isn't there to tell you what happened. It's there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear.
Joss Whedon
Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?
Neil Gaiman
He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.
David Cronenberg
My highest aspiration in life is to serve as the Limerick Laureate of Nantucket.
Alan C. Baird
Natalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents' names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it's the only way to truly keep your child. Kid grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.
Gillian Flynn
You see, there was this man, and he was a good man; he worked hard and did everything to the best of his ability. All he desired was for the most beautiful woman in the kingdom to be his wife. Now this wasn't all bad because she actually loved him too--very much so--but this vizier, he wanted her as well and not for so noble a cause as love.""What did he want her for?"Yashar paused for a moment. "So that people could look at him and say, 'He must be a great man to have such a beautiful wife.'""Oh. I thought he wanted her for sex," said Colby, disappointed.
C. Robert Cargill
Harry... take my body back, will you? Take my body back to my parents...
J.K. Rowling
She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.
Neil Gaiman
Had any parent ever succeeded in hiding marital unhappiness from their child?
Rafael Yglesias
When you’re a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you’re left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you’re just the same as everybody else.
Michael Marshall Smith
She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?
Ian McEwan
When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child, then he will return, and not before.
George R.R. Martin
He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.
Ian McEwan
I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.
Hanif Kureishi
For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very nature of their work, the long periods of isolation followed by public self-display, and the associated risk of rejection all conspire to create unnaturally intense relationships with their sexual partners. Then, when disillusion occurs, as of course it must, the sense of betrayal is profound...
Patrick McGrath
    The only one in the valley who was working was Mooney Wright.    Harrison leaned over and kneaded his hands roughly. He was wary of Mooney. Mooney was a strong one, not subject to weakness at all. He had done only one grievous act, in Harrison's mind. He had taken Lorry and the boys from him.    For a man to be jealous of his daughter was a damnable thing, Harrison thought, though he realized he had been jealous of Lorry for years. It was to her that he had let his heart go out, yes, back when she was a small thing.
John Ehle
They were the kind of couple you rolled your eyes at. The couple you wanted to punch square in their perfect noses, but secretly hoped would become your new best friends and invite you to a private dinner party where you’d eat something made with truffle oil and share a rueful laugh about the party scene in Ibiza.
Matt K. Turner
Jealousy, that diseased crow pecking at your heart.
Stewart Stafford
Melanie understands jealousy. She’s jealous, a little bit, every time Miss Justineau talks to another boy or girl in class. She wants Miss Justineau’s time to belong to her, and the reminders that it doesn’t sting a little, make her heart do a gentle drop and thud in her chest.
M.R. Carey
Jealousy is a disease, it's like a poison.
Francesca Marciano
Flailing and thrashing, Buttercup wept and tossed and paced and wept some more, and there have been three great cases of jealousy since David of Galilee was first afflicted with the emotion when he could no longer stand the fact that his neighbor Saul's cactus outshone his own. (Originally, jealousy pertained solely to plants, other people's cactus or ginkgoes, or, later, when there was grass, grass, which is why, even to this day, we say that someone is green with jealousy.) Buttercup's case rated a close fourth on the all-time list.It was a very long and very green night.
William Goldman
Famous Harry Potter," said Malfoy. "Can't even go to a bookshop without making the front page.
J.K. Rowling
I believe that we must align our actions with our highest principles. No matter the outcome, we will not have failed if we act from our best intentions.”“The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Captain,” Chakotay said with equal certainty.“So is the road to peace,” Cambridge observed.
Kirsten Beyer
Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
Robert McKee
Death Laughs In The Faces Of Clocks
Dean Cavanagh