Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 44

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.
Richard Curtis
...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
John Irving
...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.
John Irving
For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room...
Stephen King
Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.
Ray Bradbury
Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...
Richard Russo
Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
Because. Everything worth anything takes time.
Christy Hall
You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.
Christy Hall
Lost in New York City. Not that I don't know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.
Christy Hall
New York is perfect. Just the way it is. In all its imperfection.
Christy Hall
Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.
John Irving
And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.
John Irving
A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.
Christy Hall
I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting!
Christy Hall
A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
John Irving
What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.
Stephen King
The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.
Mylo Carbia
Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.
Stewart Stafford
If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself.
Neil Gaiman
What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled.
Charles Johnson
People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing…
Harlan Ellison
I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that's what he means he's quite right. I'm not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I'm going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I'm just acting the role of a tired non-conformist.
Rod Serling
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
Gore Vidal
Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.
Neil Gaiman
Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
Ray Bradbury
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
Stephen King
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
Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help.Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you?Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing.Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.
David Lindsay-Abaire
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.
Stephen King
Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don't know what the hell they're doing.
Greg Sisco
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
Ray Bradbury
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
Ian McEwan
You will learn no more once you have decided you know
Kirsten Beyer
He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in this moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood an Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (You want to see Lucy's tits? asked a voice in his head).
Neil Gaiman
It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.
Stephen King
You're different, you know.""Only different from you," he said. "Not different from me.
Belinda Bauer
She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land.
Stephen King
In the closeness of the passage, the queen could smell the other woman's perfume, a musky scent that spoke of moss and earth and wildflowers. Under it, she smelled ambition.
George R.R. Martin
Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.
Françoise Sagan
The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.
David Nicholls
The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.
Ben Aaronovitch
My mind was not that of a conqueror, but that of a cow that spends its life chewing contentedly in the meadow of invoices, waiting for the train of eternal grace to pass by. How good it felt to exist without pride of ambition. To live in hibernation.
Amélie Nothomb
To want something desperately, to be tested, to feel that life will be impossible if the object of one's desires is not achieved, is always dangerous for the soul. Some people attempt to climb Everest because, as they say, it is there; others want nothing but wealth and care little how or where they collect it; others still, with less avaricious tastes - perhaps desiring nothing more than freedom from fear - are blinded by the same personal sun that shines on all human ambition. At some time or another it burns most of us.
Bryan Forbes
Only on a few occasions had I ever been comfortable showing my body off, and now here I was, taking a job where Asian boobs and ass ran free.
Teresa Lo
Good and Bad is inside everybody. The difference is that the Good remember when they have also been bad and the Bad remember when they have only been good.
Girish Kohli
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is nothing. Catelyn
George R.R. Martin
Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?
Cormac McCarthy
This other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.
Cormac McCarthy
You can't judge a book by its cover," he said. "No," said Watts. "But you can tell how much it's gonna cost!
David Bischoff
Terrible times breed terrible things, my lord.
George R.R. Martin
God bless the lawn mower, he thought. Who was the fool who made January first New Year’s Day? No, they should set a man to watch the grasses across a million Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa lawns, and on that morning when it was long enough for cutting, instead of ratchets and horns and yelling, there should be a great swelling symphony of lawn mowers reaping fresh grass upon the prairie lands. Instead of confetti and serpentine, people should throw grass spray at each other on the one day each year that really represents Beginning!
Ray Bradbury
Here I was alone, and could take my own time. In other parts of the world one always seems to be in a great hurry, tearing from one spot to the other at a gallop, but out yonder, perhaps because distances are so great, time don't seem to matter; you can jog along, breathing fresh air and enjoying the scenery and your own thoughts about women and home and hunting and booze and money and what may lie over the next hill.
George MacDonald Fraser
He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss of a parent. If he were only in possession of this equipment, he would be just fine. He would be noble and selfless, wise and philosophical. Perhaps he would even have kids of his own, and would presumably possess the kind of maturity that comes with fatherhood, the understanding of life as a process.
David Nicholls
The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home.
Ray Bradbury
Then sense. Use your sense. Not all of us are born for greatness, but all of us have sense. Make use of it. Think. Think long and well.
Richard Llewellyn
The grave casts long shadows, Iron Lord," Mirri said. "Long and dark, and in the end no light can hold them back.
George R.R. Martin
The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us.
Chetan Bhagat