Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 35

Shut up, Ray.
Henry Kuttner
One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?
Roger Ebert
You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.
Neil Gaiman
It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.
Paul Gallico
Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.
Ben H. Winters
A watched pot never boils." It's the same with success. So? Throw that burner on HIGH and just keep on cooking. Dinner will be ready soon.
Christy Hall
There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.
Stephen King
On Hayao MiyazakiI told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are."We have a word for that in Japanese," he said, "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry? "I don't think it's like the "pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.
Roger Ebert
Repeat the mantra: Writing is when I make the words. Editing is when I make them not shitty.
Chuck Wendig
Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.
Stephen King
At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style...but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.
Stephen King
I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.
Ray Bradbury
... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.
Stephen King
You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!
Stephen King
Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.
A.B. Guthrie Jr.
Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen King
Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.
Stephen King
The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.
David Nicholls
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Raymond Chandler
It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King
Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Neil Gaiman
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.
Neil Gaiman
Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?
Stephen King
The Only Good Greed Is Greed For Enlightening Experiences
Dean Cavanagh
Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.
Lillian Hellman
There's more than enough for the many, but somehow never enough for the few
Dean Cavanagh
A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adective is often applied to those "liberals" who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the hightest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.
Gore Vidal
It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.
Stephen King
I want an Oompa-Loompa!' screamed Veruca.
Roald Dahl
She had always been comforted by confectionery
Sue Townsend
And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear.
Ray Bradbury
The thing about coming back from the dead was that your life went on.
Brian McGreevy
Whatever she is now she's better than she was," said Bedloe. "Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.
Ray Bradbury
He was in Guanajuato, Mexico, he was a writer, and tonight was the Day of the Dead ceremony. He was in a little room on the second floor of a hotel, a room with wide windows and a balcony that overlooked the plaza where the children ran and yelled each morning. He heard them shouting now. And this was Mexico's Death Day. There was a smell of death all through Mexico you never got away from, no matter how far you went. No matter what you said or did, not even if you laughed or drank, did you ever get away from death in Mexico. No car went fast enough. No drink was strong enough.("The Candy Skull")
Ray Bradbury
How quickly the dead faded into each other,
Ian McEwan
It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.
Richard Matheson
Again he shook his head. The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!
Richard Matheson
How can you kill a man who'd already been dead for years?
Peter Hedges
Not everyone believes in ghost’s, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?“ She had shaken her head slowly. "Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evie said. “That’s what ghost’s are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.
Stephen King
The best to do with a death was to move on from it.
Larry McMurtry
Three good men dead, to save a hedge knight's foot.
George R.R. Martin
You want to go out to dinner sometime?Sorry, no. I'm married, not hungry, infected with seven unknown diseases, gay, pregnant with lizards and clinically dead.
Warren Ellis
He looked exactly the same when he was alive, only he was vertical.
Jack Trevor Story
I woke up dead.Not only dead...but in hell.I had always been somewhat sketchy on what the afterlife - were there actually such a thing - would be like for a person such as I. From all accounts and all my imaginings, I figured it would be one of two things. Either I would be surrounded by great, burning masses that were endlessly immolating souls in torment... or else I would find myself trapped within my own mind as a helpless bystander, condemned to watching me live out my life over and over again and powerless to do anything to change any of it. When idle speculation prompted me to dwell on these two options, I would find myself drawn invariably to the former, since the later was just too hideous to contemplate....I was almost afraid to open my eyes, because once I did, I would know one way or the other. Perhaps I could have just lain there forever. Perhaps I was supposed to. Perhaps that was my true condemnation: to simply reside in hell with my eyes closed afraid of opening them lest matters deteriorate even further than they already had. This, in turn, made me dwell on the fact that every time I had believed things couldn’t get worse, they promptly had done so with almost gleeful enthusiasm .
Peter David
You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?
J.K. Rowling
All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one...
Stephen King
Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.
Tom Perrotta
Hope? Hope is not the absence of tragedy, my friend. It is the conviction that tragedy can be endured. Hope is the spark in you that is not subdued in the face of the vast and callous indifference of the universe. Hope is that which is not shattered by hardship. Hope is the urge to fight what is wrong even when you know it will destroy you. Hope is the decision to love and need someone knowing that they will one day die. For me to promise that there are no obstacles would be the cruelest lie I could possibly tell. That lie is not hope. Hope is the will which needs no lies.
Travis Beacham
See? Memories aren't happy, they're sad. Don't you know anything?
Morris Gleitzman
Our word Tragedy comes from the Greek, tragos-ode: “The song of the goat.” Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.
Neil Gaiman
We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.
George R.R. Martin
Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.
Neal Shusterman
On a sunny Tuesday - for it seems so many awful things happen on a Tuesday - six astronauts and one schoolteacher attempted to pierce the sky. Instead they touched the stars.
Neal Shusterman
The mission sat in a converted store front on the corner of a medium-busy street. There was a small crowd gathered in front - no real surprise, since they gave out food and clothing, all all you had to do was spend a few moments of your life listening to the good reverend explain why you were going to Hell. It seemed like a pretty good bargain, even to me, but I wasn't hungry.
Jeff Lindsay
No! The mission was to terminate one Hipo officer. Not four by random. You didn’t get him so the operation was a failure.”Johannes aka ‘BB’The Informer by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
There are those who see film and take it seriously as an artistic medium, and others who go to have a good time, to simply be entertained. I have to be careful , because it sounds like I am condemning, or criticizing what people are doing. I have nothing against that, in the same way that some people like rock music or to go dancing, and other people like to go to a Beethoven concert. It's just that I'm more interested in the one than the other.
Michael Haneke
And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful.
Stephen King
I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." . . . Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Roger Ebert
A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.
Roger Ebert
Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said."Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?""It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart."I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain't. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. I was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind.
Budd Schulberg