Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 31

Why were things funny? Was God laughing at us? Or was laughter the dispensation of God? Maybe laughter itself was Godlike. When we laugh, we rise above pain. We rise above indignity. We even rise above incredulity. We "get it." Maybe in the way God "gets it.
Richard Tillotson
Those are the only to verbalizations usually that we make in movies—either to scream or to laugh—because those two reactions are rather close. Most things we laugh at are things that are really horrible, when you think about them. It’s funny and you don’t scream, as long as it’s not you. If it’s somebody else you can laugh.
Stephen King
Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.
Françoise Sagan
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
Stephen King
My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.
Michael Haneke
You never think it’s going to happen to you, do you?
Sarah Lotz
It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
Ian McEwan
He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.
Stephen King
That's what everyone forgets these days: there's a fine line between sanity and insanity. Lots of people are on the edge. We can't be in perfect balance all the time.
Poppy Adams
So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
Ray Bradbury
The young man was sort of ... well ... peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know.
Stephen King
When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
Stephen King
Insane people give me hope.""What!!!!" I almost dropped my beer."The insane have decided to stay on," Crumley said. "They love life so much that, rather than destroy it, they go behind a self-made wall to hide. Pretend not to hear, but the do hear. Pretend not to see, but see. Insanity says: I hate living but love life. Hate the rules but do like me. So, rather than drop in graves, I hide out. Not in liquor, nor in bed under sheets, nor in a needle's prick or snuffs of white powder, but in madness. On my own shelf, in my own rafters, under my own silent roof. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sand and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
Ray Bradbury
Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.
John Irving
I'll take crazy over stupid any day.
Joss Whedon
I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.
Neil Gaiman
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
Ray Bradbury
Unfortunately, Susan didn't remember what Jane Fulton once said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
Rita Mae Brown
When you drop a pebble into a pond, ripples spread out, changing all the water in the pool. The ripples hit the shore and rebound, bumping into one another, breaking each other apart. In some small way, the pond is never the same again.
Neal Shusterman
She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.
Raymond Chandler
What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin.
Doug Dorst
The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
Ray Bradbury
In the deep sands a man must hoard his water.
George R.R. Martin
All water is holy water.
Rajiv Joseph
What," asked Mr Croup, "do you want?""What," asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, "does anyone want?""Dead things," suggested Mr Vandemar. "Extra teeth.
Neil Gaiman
You with the tentacles, you're nicked!
Paul Cornell
DI Cartwright: The cat is booby trapped? DI Quill: Welcome to my world.
Paul Cornell
Understanding was coming so fast, it seemed to bypass thought.
J.K. Rowling
If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.
Ray Bradbury
You should've thought of that before becoming a fir
Ray Bradbury
If you're reading this, then I guess someone, somewhere does go through the rubbish and read every piece of paper that gets balled up and tossed away. So in that case here it is- my name's Sal.
Alex Scarrow
Read non-interesting books!
Enock Maregesi
He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity’s engine.
Stephen King
One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more...
Ray Bradbury
My mother was the bringer of storms. The dark and the light. Death and rebirth. She was as dangerous as she was beautiful as she rode the lightning. Once a potent force of nature she had the nerve to look down on us from those lofty heights.
Scarlett Amaris
What up you guys, I'm back!
Jackson Lanzing
It's like we are underground, in a cemetery....the sky is the earth...We are hibernating, sleeping all the time and we don't know it. We are dreaming that there is plenty of oxygen.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
I look out over my life and see a million question marks with only a few definitive exclamation points. I'm living for the next exclamation.
Christy Hall
You've been dreaming lies again, Susana.
Juan Rulfo
Approaching the state of Delaware, the dreamer is a small dog, dreaming impatiently of a past life, long forgotten, when he sailed tall ships across uncharted. The salt spray of the ocean stings my face.
Neil Gaiman
There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.
Juan Rulfo
People always say that once it goes away, you forget the pain. It’s a cliché of childbirth: you forget the pain. I don’t happen to agree. I remember the pain. What you really forget is love. Divorce seems as if it will last forever, and then suddenly, one day, your children grow up, move out, and make lives for themselves, and except for an occasional flare, you have no contact at all with your ex-husband. The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it’s over.
Nora Ephron
That was the kind of life she’d had as a child, and it was the kind she wanted as an adult. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Things in life seldomdid, she’d come to understand
Nicholas Sparks
But the main problem with our marriages was not that our husbands wouldn’t share the housework but that we were unbelievably irritable young women and our husbands irritated us unbelievably. - The D Word
Nora Ephron
. . .once you find out he's cheated on you, you have to keep finding out, over and over and over again, until you've degraded yourself so completely that there's nothing left to do but walk out.
Nora Ephron
But when you've had children with someone you're divorced from, divorce defines everything; it's the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.
Nora Ephron
But the truth is you don't always know you're getting a divorce. For years, you're married. Then, one day, the concept of divorce enters your head. It sits there for a while. You lean toward it and then you lean away. You make lists. You calculate how much it will cost. You tote up grievances, and pluses and minuses.
Nora Ephron
The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.Enough about that.The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.And now it's not.
Nora Ephron
I took my clothes out of the cupboard and looked at myself in the mirror. I dropped the wet towel. i took a long, clear-eyed look at myself. that i was different was nowhere apparent.
Sachin Kundalkar
Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.
Christopher Bram
No, I just mean … I’m not into … this.”“This?” Her scowl deepens and her teeth bare. “Alie
Chuck Wendig
Why are you asking me? I'm seventeen and don't know anything about what to do when you're autistic and gay.
Claire LaZebnik
Lots of people hate gay people.You can tell who they are because they start sentences with, "It's not like I hate gay people.
Ali Liebegott
If Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by the churches, by the government, by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours.
Dustin Lance Black
If he’s not gay and he hung out with you the whole time, he wanted to be. It’s boyfriend or want to be boyfriend or I guess gay. Those are the choices.
Daniel Handler
...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.
Stephen King
You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it.
William Goldman
Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.
Stephen King
I don’t think writers compete, I think they’re all doing separate things in their own style.
Elmore Leonard
If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place... Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings.
Neil Gaiman