Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 40

There is no perfect first experience of anything. There is only our ability to find a shard of perfection in the wildly imperfect situations we inevitably find ourselves in [Cram, Cusi, "‘One Life to Live’ and 14 Beautiful Boys to Kiss," Cafe, January 14, 2015].
Cusi Cram
Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect,nevertheless.
Ray Bradbury
Perfection is an illusion. Yet perfectionists demand it from others while being far from flawless themselves. The margin of error of the human condition is often our greatest area of excellence and discovery.
Stewart Stafford
Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man.Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.
Billy Wilder
Nothing in life has any business being perfect.
James Goldman
Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing - with wave lengths, just as sound and light have.
Richard Connell
Every person has lots of ingredients to make them what is always a one-in-a-kind creation. We are all imperfect genetic stews.
Holly Goldberg Sloan
The other houses in the neighborhood had Christmas lights up and trees visible in their windows, but not Shae's. She and I were the only ones who didn't care anymore, and I liked that about her.
Teresa Lo
The town is mobbed out with Saturday shoppers looking for Christmas bargains. You can almost breathe in the raw greed which hangs in the air like vapour. As the late afternoon darkness falls, the lights look tacky and sinister.
Irvine Welsh
Miracles happen on Christmas, Pat. Everybody knows that shit.
Matthew Quick
The singing grew louder as they approached the church. It made Harry’s throat constrict, it reminded him so forcefully of Hogwarts, of Peeves bellowing rude versions of carols from inside suits of armour, of the Great Hall’s twelve Christmas trees, of Dumbledore wearing a bonnet he had won in a cracker, of Ron in a hand-knitted sweater…
J.K. Rowling
Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.
Alan Bradley
A sweet fruit for a sweet fight.
George R.R. Martin
Fight back. Bite back.
Benjamin Percy
A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.
Alan Bradley
[Howard's] eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were--illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive, and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end... 'Can you hear me?' I asked him. 'I know you can see me.' Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, 'So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.
Gore Vidal
‎"The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We cannot fetch them all in, if we did we should not know what to do with them. The shells will bury them...
Enrich M. Remarque
I will not go back. No bad thing for me to die. I will make it happen so that it happens only once.
Shahrukh Husain
They say that when a man is going to drown, when he finally gives up the struggle - it's sort of blissful, for a moment. And then he drowns.
John Hodge
The central question of any execution: do you want the hood on or off? Would you rather see it coming? Or would you rather simply drift away, cocooned in warm darkness, stinking of nothing but yourself? A kind, familiar place to hide in, just before the snap, the crackle? Or the pop?
Gemma Files
The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering on the doorstep.
Alan Bradley
I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear
Roger Ebert
They say you fly when you die.Basically, when you die, your spirit leaves your body. Actually, at first you can see all your life, like, reflected in a magic mirror. Then you start floating like a ghost. You can see anything happening around you, you can hear everything, but you can’t communicate with the world of the living.Then you see these lights, all these different lights, of all different colors. These lights are the doors that pull you into other planes of existence, but most people actually like this world so much that they don’t want to be taken away… So the whole thing turns into a bad trip and the only way out is to get reincarnated.It’s funny you know, DMT only lasts for six minutes but it really seems like eternity. It’s the same chemical that your brain receives when you die. It’s a little bit like, dying would be the ultimate trip.
Gaspar Noé
You never know when you're going to die, but maybe something in you does, some cellular consciousness that's aware of the cosmic countdown and starts making plans.
Jonathan Trooper
Death: When next we meet, the hour will strike for you and your friends.Antonius Block: And will you reveal your secrets?Death: I have no secrets.Antonius Block: So do you know nothing?Death: I am unknowing.
Ingmar Bergman
What about you?" he asked, his words not much more than a mumble. "Regrets?""Many," Skuduggery said.Tesseract's breath rattled in his chest. "That's the goo thing about living. You get to make up for past mistakes.""Or make brand-new ones.
Derek Landy
Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)
Nora Ephron
Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone.
J.K. Rowling
The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.
Tony Kushner
If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear.
Gene Roddenberry
There isn't anything you can't make run a little better, a little faster, a little smoother, if you take the time to analyse it and component-split the processes.
Alex Scarrow
A day ago, the sight of a man removing his face would have blown thick chunks of Aiden’s mind out the back of his head, but not today. Today Aiden was fresh out of shock and running low on wonder.
Matt K. Turner
I'll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!
John Irving
Fools "Sell Out" Where Angels Fear to Tread
Dean Cavanagh
So you're an angel, fine, that's terrific. Now give me back my shadows. (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel)
Peter S Beagle
Empathy Is An Endangered Instinct
Dean Cavanagh
We weep for the blood of a bird, but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those who have voice.
Mamoru Oshii
I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist’s palette capture the full range of what you mean to me?
Nicholas Sparks
Empathy? What’s that?” Glokta winced as he rubbed at his aching leg. “It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.
Joe Abercrombie
A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else's head. You see out of the world through somebody else's eyes. It's very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book by one of those people.
Neil Gaiman
Those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
J.K. Rowling
An inability (or reduced ability) to empathise is not the same as an inability to love. Love is a powerful feeling for another person, often defying logic.
Graeme Simsion
There were relatives of their victims among the Hogwarts students, who now found themselves the unwilling objects of a gruesome sort of reflected fame as they walked the corridors: Susan Bones, whose uncle, aunt, and cousins had all died at the hands of one of the ten, said miserably during Herbology that she now had a good idea what it felt like to be Harry."And I don't know how you stand it- it's horrible" she said bluntly.
J.K. Rowling
I asked Patrick if he felt sad that he had to keep it a secret, and Patrick just said that he wasn't sad because at least now, Brad doesn't have to get drunk or stoned to make love.
Stephen Chbosky
If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.
Paul Auster
I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.
Roger Ebert
It’s like when you’re excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means you’re happy, too.
Stephen Chbosky
Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.
Russell T. Davies
I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.
Paul Auster
You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.
Ian McEwan
The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill.
Mike Carey
In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
Ray Bradbury
When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.
Roger Ebert
The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now — he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again — but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don’t stop til you get enough.
Stephen King
The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
Stephen King
Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.
Christy Hall
Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.
John Irving
On some days, writing is wonderful. On the days when it is wonderful, it feels like you are the God of a universe that the rest of the world is not yet privy to. And then on some days, it is not wonderful; those days when nothing is coming and the cursor seems to be openly mocking you, blinking out ‘YOU SUCK AT WRITING AND YOU’RE UGLY AS BALLS’ in Morse code.
Leigh Whannell
On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.
Chuck Wendig
Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.
Françoise Sagan