Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 34

Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy's exact words-why bother to go on living?
Paul Auster
Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?
Julian Fellowes
At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.
John Irving
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Stanley Kubrick
Why then you're as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust 'reality' and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.
Ray Bradbury
You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.
Stephen King
It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Expect the unexpected like a chain smoking, hard drinking, monochrome world dwelling Noir Detective
Dean Cavanagh
we exceeded expectations just by turning up for the exams." - George Weasly
J.K. Rowling
If you expect nothing, you can never be disappointed.
Tonya Hurley
After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.
Tom Perrotta
If you expect nothing, you can never be disappointed.Apart from a few starry-eyed poets or monks living on a mountaintop somewhere, however, we all have expectations. We not only have them, we need them. They fuel our dreams, our hopes, and our lives like some super-caffeinated energy drink.
Tonya Hurley
You see what you expect to see, Severus.
J.K. Rowling
There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother's life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I'd think 'This isn't the way our lives are supposed to be going.' Then I'd think 'Half the world has the same idea.
Stephen King
Men have enslaved each other since they invented gods to forgive them for doing it.
Seth Grahame-Smith
I’m sorry to pull you out of your classes, but your adviser understands,” Kitteredge said. “He’s a friend of the family.”So that’s it, Neal thought. You bought me; you own me.
Don Winslow
The song just started again, and now I sang it, too. "These strong hands belong to you..." I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones... and then there was another, and another--all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold. "These strong hands belong to you..." They sang--we sang--with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell's, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn't understand. This, though--this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.
Ben H. Winters
Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.
Laura Esquivel
Mercy and cowardice are the same," she snapped out. "But you want their land, not their lives, no? Dead men can't obey.
Joe Abercrombie
You want to be merciful. To stand in the light. I understand it. I admire it. But, my queen...Only the victors can be merciful.
Joe Abercrombie
…but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy.
Stephen King
And there he would either be mercifully annihilated or live forever, insane and yet conscious inside It's homicidal endless formless hungry being.
Stephen King
There was nothing for it now but to throw himself on Campos's mercy, and it had been Mr. Rebeck's experience of mercy that it had a tendency to buckle under the weight of a human soul.
Peter S Beagle
This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer, or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride — he's my dad — and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.
Nick Cave
It was a moment before she replied. And in that moment, she realized that what was gone from her was the child in her, she'd crossed a brink from which there was no turning back. Whoever she had been, she was not anymore. And her life, for better or worse, would never again be what it had.
Allan Folsom
Gillman smiles, in the cold manner of an assassin. It's like looking in the mirror.
Irvine Welsh
There was a lull. Sammy was staring across the room at George Opdyke, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was about to say he was lost in thought, but Sammy was never really lost, and he never actually thought, for that implied deep reflection. He was figuring. Miss Goldblum edged her undernourished white hand into his. Sammy played with it absent-mindedly, like a piece of silverware.
Budd Schulberg
Better to be dirty than dead.
Stephen King
We don’t really communicate […]. We talk all right, talk in that strange language we’ve evolved for the purposes of avoiding communication. That non-language we’ve created. Perhaps it’s a sign that civilisation is regressing. Something is anyway.
Irvine Welsh
A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
Raymond Chandler
If you would seek to find yourselflook not in the mirrorfor there is but a shadow there'A stranger....SILENIUS, ODES TO TRUTH
Sidney Sheldon
I never understood what Jaime saw in you, apart from his own reflection.
George R.R. Martin
I walked out this evening to the bottom of the garden and smoked a cigarette. Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty year's time, if we're still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years' time I'll be in my mid-sixties and I realize that these forward projections that you make, so unreflectingly, in your life are beginning to run out. Suppose I'd said in forty years' time? That would be pushing it, Fifty? I'll probably be gone by then. Sixty? Dead and buried, for sure. Thank Christ I didn't plant an oak. Is that a good definition of of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize-quite rationally, quite unemotionally-that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.
William Boyd
There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years.
J.K. Rowling
He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
Ray Bradbury
Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don't have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuits again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable, time isn't there like the landing and the garden and the route to school.
Mark Haddon
Because this exact leaf had to grow in that exact way, in that exact place, so that precise wind could tear it from that precise branch and make it fly into this exact face at that exact moment. And, if just one of those tiny little things had never had happened, I'd never have met ya. Which makes this leaf the most important leaf in human history
Neil Cross
She was a planet, way out in space, out of its orbit, and he was an unmanned spaceship, taking measurements of the atmosphere. She was not suitable for habitation.
Thomas Pierce
Death is the ultimate negative.
Tom Stoppard
As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Tom Stoppard
To Vic and other kids his age, the past didn't exist except as a quick, oversimplified Wikipedia snippets, that ultimately didn't matter because they weren't now. Dolores wonders if that is all she really is, a little piece of now, relentlessly pushed forward by time, trying desperately to look back over her shoulder to see what the past could possibly tell her, but caught in a rush that refused to stand still long enough for her to hear what it had to say.
David Hontiveros
Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
Tom Perrotta
It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?
Stephen King
In your dream you call for Chaplain Charlie. You met the Navy chaplain when you interviewed him for a feature article you were writing. Chaplain Charlie was an amateur magician. With his magic, Chaplain Charlie entertained Marines in sick bays and distributed spiritual tourniquets to men who were still alive, but weaponless. To brutal, godless children Chaplain Charlie spoke about how God is merciful, despite appearances, about how the Ten Commandments lack detail because when you're writing on stone tablets with lightning bolts you've got to be brief, about how the Free World will conquer Communism with aid of God and a few Marines, and about free fish. One day a Vietnamese child booby-trapped Chaplain Charlie's black bag of tricks. Chaplain Charlie reached in and pulled out a bright ball of death...
Gustav Hasford
I tell the squad a joke: "Stop me if you're heard this. There was a Marine of nuts and bolts, half robot--weird but true--whose every move was cut from pain as though from stone. His stoney little hide had been crushed and broken. But he just laughed and said, 'I've been crushed and broken before.' And sure enough, he had the heart of a bear. His heart functioned for weeks after it had been diagnosed by doctors. His heart weighed half a pound. His heart pumped seven hundred thousand gallons of warm blood through one hundred thousand miles of veins, working hard--hard enough in twelve hours to lift one sixty-five ton boxcar one foot off the deck. He said. The world would not waste the heart of a bear, he said. On his clean blue pajamas many medals hung. He was a walking word of history, in the shop for a few repairs. He took it on the chin and was good. One night in Japan his life came out of his body--black--like a question mark. If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs perhaps you have misjudged the situation. Stop me if you've heard this...
Gustav Hasford
bullshit french post-war rationalizing
Woody Allen
Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live outside time. And when you live outside time, there is no day and night. You don't get a chance to die.
Paul Auster
If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache.
Stanley Kubrick
Uncertainty is the normal state.
Tom Stoppard
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Tom Stoppard
I want my name to mean me.
Mark Haddon
I can't destroy things so beautiful.""Time will destroy them if you don't. Time destroys everything. But if you destroy them, it will mean something.
Neal Shusterman
Destruction is as valid an artistic statement as construction. Both statements echo the model of the society we live in. The only invalid art is utopian
Dean Cavanagh
The world might be going up in flames, but we have to carry on as normal
Darren Shan
I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage.
Neil Gaiman
The sword was not the kingdom, he says.
George R.R. Martin
I was a married woman! she said. Why does every generation believe it is the discoverer of pleasure? Your father was a spectacular lover. Even through the wall, I could hear the triumph in her voice.
Karen Essex
Life is more than love and pleasure,I came to dig for treasure.If you want to play, you gotta pay,You know it's always been that wayWe all came digging for treasure.
Stephen King
I wonder if it is the same for women, whether women always feel this pain when they are fucked? Or is it only in sodomy that pain and pleasure are so linked, so inextricable?
Christos Tsiolkas
The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. And later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships fit days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself shutting high up in the crow's nest of the foremost mast on such ship, gliding on through the endless shell of the sea -- which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhilaration of breath, the end of all smells -- dissolving with pleasure in that breath.
Patrick Süskind