Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 50

Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away.
John Irving
There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.
Woody Allen
Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.
Rod Serling
I sat and three hours later realized I had been seized by an idea that started short but grew to wild size by day's end. The concept was so riveting I found it hard at sunset to flee the library basement and take the bus home to reality: my house, my wife, and our baby daughter.
Ray Bradbury
Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.
Stephen Chbosky
In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.
Ian McEwan
I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.
Neil Gaiman
It sounds like a terrible idea,” said Friday. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.
R.A. Spratt
Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.
Grant Morrison
Information can be harmful when you're not ready for it. ['The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes']
Richard Walter
My dear boy, your thinking has no structure, no foundation. You pick up your primary ideas from TV shows. You're like a fart in the bathtub. ['The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes']
Richard Walter
But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do wit
Neil Gaiman
Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
Neil Gaiman
Why aren’t you asking a hundred other guys why they don’t write strong women characters? I believe that what I’m doing should not be remarked upon, let alone honoured… Because equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women. And the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now. 'So, why do you write these strong female characters?' Because you’re still asking me that ques
Joss Whedon
Do you understand economics? I mean big-time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get how it worked? I don't, and anyone who says they do is full of shit.
Max Brooks
Only merchants have money to waste, and what are they but parasites who create nothing, grow nothing, make nothing but feed off another's labor?
James Clavell
We give more economic aid to multinational corporations to increase their profits than we do to all the countries in the world combined.
Michael Hogan
Ah remember walkin along Princes Street wi Spud, we both hate walkin along that hideous street, deadened by tourists and shoppers, the twin curse ay modern capitalism.
Irvine Welsh
I was happiest when I was working for myself. Setting my own goals. Improving my own skills… Take control of your world.
Warren Ellis
...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust
Nathanael West
I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.
Richard Linklater
Not anyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
Jan Pinkava Ratatouille
No. Not yet. A craftsman only. But I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very very lucky, I will make a weapon that is a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer.
William Goldman
An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.
Federico Fellini
You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.
Steven Pressfield
The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.
Steven Pressfield
The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others.
Steven Pressfield
The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell.
Steven Pressfield
Behind every work of art lies the enormous pretension of exhibiting one's vision of the world. If such obvious arrogance is not counterbalanced by the tribulations of doubt, all that remains is a monster who is to art what a fanatic is to faith.
Amélie Nothomb
There’s nothing that makes an artist more beloved than the audience pitying him because his work comes at a price they would never pay.
Rafael Yglesias
The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can’t see the suffering he causesto those around him. And the’ll neverunderstand the purity of his goal, how the heatof his invention won’t melt the ice in his heart.He must be ruthless!No religion, no purpose except this:Make something perfect before you die.Life is short, art is for all time
Ian McEwan
Oh, there are no living poets, Miss Van Damn. We're not entirely sure there ever were. They've found some shreds of sonnets in England and, embedded in a chalk wall of a cave in France, some yet undetermined thing which might be the legendary inward eye. But all evidence, such as it is, suggests that, if there ever were poets, they were all burned into extinction during the interglacial period of despair.
Paddy Chayefsky
It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.
David Benioff
A thousand years or more ago,When I was newly sewn,There lived four wizards of renown,Whose name are still well-known:Bold Gryffindor from wild moor,Fair Ravlenclaw from glen,Sweet Hufflepuff from valley broad,Shrewd Slytherin from fen.They share a wish, a hope, a dream,They hatched a daring plan,To educate young sorcerers,Thus Hogwarts school began.Now each of these four foundersFormed their own house, for eachDid value different virtues,In the ones they had to teach.By Gryffindor, the bravest werePrized far beyond the rest;For Ravenclaw, the cleverestWould always be the best;For Hufflepuff, hardworkers wereMost worthy of admission;And power-hungry SlytherinLoved those of great ambition.While still alive they did divideTheir favourates from the throng,Yet how to pick the worthy onesWhen they were dead and gone? 'Twas Gryffindor who found the way,He whipped me off his headThe founders put some brains in meSo I could choose instead!Now slip me snug around your ears,I've never yet been wrong,I'll have alook inside your mind And tell where you belong!
J.K. Rowling
BARRY GIFFORD, Author of "Wild at Heart" on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester:"Marisa Lankester's unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why." Film "Wild at Heart" won Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Film by David Lynch
Barry Gifford
This book tells my story. I’m writing it in Ireland, in a house on a hillside. The house sits low in the landscape between a holy well and the site of an Iron Age dwelling. It was built of stones ploughed out of the fields by men who knew how to raise them with their hands and to lock one stone to the next so each was firm. It’s a lone house on the foothills of the last mountain on the Dingle peninsula, the westernmost point in mainland Europe. At night the sky curves above it like a dark bowl, studded with stars.…From the moment I crossed the mountain, I fell in love with the place, which was more beautiful than any I’d ever seen. And with a way of looking at life that was deeper, richer, and wiser than any I’d known before.
Felicity Hayes-McCoy
Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game’s up.
Hanif Kureishi
Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.
Larry McMurtry
Now, through an act as simple as walking across a stage and collecting an empty plastic folder representing a degree, our stock had plummeted to nothing, the wretched leavings of some cosmic Ponzi scheme. A lifetime's worth of planning and training and delusion gone with the wind. Some of us were moving home to live free of charge in our parents' guest rooms, or if we were thin enough, heading west to try our luck in L.A.; others, to our collective horror, were being forced to work at actual jobs.
Rachel Shukert
Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.
Stephen King
It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy -for any of its millions- to have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished. Wealth, rank or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.
Moss Hart
What's your name?""Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?""Wanted.""By all the girls or just the law?
Dennis Lehane
Dating is like pushing your tray along in a cafeteria. Nothing looks good, but you know you have to pick something by the time you reach the cashier.
Caprice Crane
So are there any asshole guys here I can start dating?' she says. 'That's, like, my pattern.
Gillian Flynn
And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there’s always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is… Well, it’s just you. And when you go, it’s gone. Nothing abstract about it.
Nick Hornby
We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
Nick Hornby
He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.
Nick Hornby
Don't you understand how Cho's feeling at the moment?" [Hermione] asked."No," said Ron and Harry together.Hermione sighed and laid down her quill."Well, obviously, she's feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she's feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can't work out who she likes best. Then she'll be feeling guilty, thinking it's an insult to Cedric's memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she'll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry. And she probably can't work out what her feelings toward Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that's all very mixed up and painful. Oh, and she's afraid she's going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she's been flying so badly."A slightly stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, then Ron said, "One person can't feel all that at once, they'd explode.""Just because you've got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have," said Hermione nastily, picking up her her quill again.
J.K. Rowling
The likelihood of meeting anyone who wouldn't make him feel even lonelier seemed increasingly remote. Life was a dwindling process now, not a building proposition. He couldn't imagine being with someone new, opening up, feeling appreciated and understood, without having to explain his dubious non sequiturs and increasingly arcane or redundant frame of reference.
Peter Nichols
I'm attracted to difficulty, I think. I'm attracted to guys who have truckloads of baggage. With them, it will never, ever be simple. And then they do or say one little magical thing and they own me.
Kara Lee Corthron
When I was younger I was attracted to gay guys and they were "attracted" to me. I don't exactly know why...But it turned out the gay guys were the ones holding all the cards, both physically and emotionally, and I've certainly paid the price for making that mistake. And so have all of the guys I've dated since.
Hilary Winston
But even of him I can think of with sorrow, now at this moment.Those times, those people...have gone. How can there be fury felt for things that are gone to dust.
Richard Llewellyn
She might have wept then, had not the sky begun to do it for her.
George R.R. Martin
Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes are the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.
Richard Llewellyn
Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Stephen King
True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Stephen King
She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.
Cormac McCarthy
A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.
Françoise Sagan
If I could have all of those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not.
Nick Hornby
That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
Nick Hornby