Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 61

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
That is the trouble...You are a crowd of bits of boys all in the thing for what you will get. Demands, you call them. Well, I am against demands of any kind. You cannot reason with demand, and where there is no reason, there is no sense. As for your support, whatever you call it, some long word, what is the use of it?
Richard Llewellyn
What would the world come to if people kept carrying grudges against all reason? That has been the cross of Sicily, where men are so busy with vendettas they have no time to earn bread for their families.
Mario Puzo
I was afraid of being rejected, yes. I was also afraid of being accepted for the wrong reasons.
Erich Segal
Stephanie had no problem doing what shewas told, just so long as she was given a good reason why sheshould.
Derek Landy
And remember: the flesh is as sacred as it is profane.
Brian McGreevy
Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.
Dennis Lehane
Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion.
Dennis Lehane
I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off.
Rita Mae Brown
Moving right alongIn search of good timesAnd good news,With good friends you can't lose.This could become a habit.Opportunity just knocked,Let's reach out and grab it,Together we'll nab it,We'll hitch-hike, bus, or yellow cab it.
Jim Henson
No one remembers how you got a chance, they only remember what you did with it.
Stewart Stafford
The feel of her body against his was exhilarating, driving all rational thought from his head. “All right, prepareyourself, Claire Brennan.”She looked up at him curiously. “Prepare myself forwhat?”He gazed at her affectionately. “Repeat your mantra, orwhatever it is you do. Because I’m about to kiss you.
Syrie James
That's why I don't tell people about us. They wouldn't understand, and 1 don't feel the need to explain, simply because I know in my heart how real it was. When I think of you, I can't help smiling, knowing that you've completed me somehow. I love you, not just for now, but for always, and I dream of the day that you'll take me in your arms again.
Nicholas Sparks
Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.
Nora Ephron
Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can't control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That's what it was like for me. I didn't plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of us could control what was happening to us. We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has happened only once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory. I'll never forget a single moment of it.
Nicholas Sparks
That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.
Nicholas Sparks
Phillip Murray and Wanda Saxton meet in the last scene under the rainy awning, their wrong wife and fiance finally story-lined away, and walk out together into the downpour - we know from the first scene, Christmas eve, that both of them like walking in the rain but don't have anybody who will do it with them - and it's the miracle of the ending.
Daniel Handler
He is a sweet boy, quick to laugh, easy to love.
George R.R. Martin
... you only know what I want you to know, you only see what I want you to see."...Wade: " I don't care! I am in love with your mind, with the person you are. I couldn't care about the packaging.
Ernest Cline
Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full
Stephen King
A moment later, he plopped down on the sand beside her, and when they accidentally touched, Gabby had the briefest flash of them sitting together just like this on a hundred different weekends in the future.
Nicholas Sparks
That's good. And speaking of spelling, tell me -- do you wrap your head in a towel after you shower?
Nicholas Sparks
in all the years we spend together, I never once regretted the fact that I had chosen her and that she had chosen me as well.
Nicholas Sparks
Love means never having to say you're sorry.
Erich Segal
Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.
Peter S Beagle
The young nihilists," Dad called us."What are nihilists?""Nihilists believe that nothing has any meaning. They believe in nothing.""Yeah," said Earl. "I'm a nihilist."Me, too," I said."Good for you," Dad said, grinning. Then he stopped grinning and said, "Don't tell your mom.
Jesse Andrews
He was especially excited about Aguirre, the Wrath of God. "Look at this crazy dude," he yelled, point at Klaus Kinski, who on the cover is wearing a Viking helmet and looks like a psychopath. So--with Dad's permission--we put the film in and watched it. This would turn out to be the single most important thing ever to happen in our lives.
Jesse Andrews
We loved it. We loved how slow it was. We love that it took forever. Actually, we never wanted it to end. We loved the jungle, the rafts, the ridiculous armor and helmets. . .I think most of all we loved that it didn't have a happy ending for anyone. The whole time we were sort of expecting that someone would survive because that's how stories work: Even if everything is a total disaster, someone lives to tell the tale. But not with Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Hell no. Everyone dies. That's awesome.
Jesse Andrews
Are you?" I said. "Gay, I mean?" -I hoped he wasn't offended by my asking, but after everything that had happened, I really wanted to know."No," he said. "I thought I was for about a w-w-week once. But now I know I'm not."If there was ever an answer that sounded like the truth, that was it.
Brent Hartinger
The Muse honors the working stiff.
Steven Pressfield
FLETCHER: The truth is I don’t think people understand what it is I did at Shaffer. I wasn’t there to conduct. Any idiot can move his hands and keep people in tempo. No, it’s about pushing people beyond what’s expected of them. And I believe that is a necessity. Because without it you’re depriving the world of its next Armstrong. Its next Parker. Why did Charlie Parker become Charlie Parker, Andrew? ANDREW: Because Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him.FLETCHER: Exactly. Young kid, pretty good on the sax, goes up to play his solo in a cutting session, fucks up -- and Jones comes this close to slicing his head off for it. He’s laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night. But the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And practices and practices. With one goal in mind: that he never ever be laughed off-stage again. A year later he goes back to the Reno, and he plays the best motherfucking solo the world had ever heard. Now imagine if Jones had just patted young Charlie on the head and said “Good job.” Charlie would’ve said to himself, “Well, shit, I did do a good job,” and that’d be that. No Bird. Tragedy, right? Except that’s just what people today want. The Shaffer Conservatories of the world, they want sugar. You don’t even say “cutting session” anymore, do you? No, you say “jam session”. What the fuck kind of word is that? Jam session? It’s a cutting session, Andrew, this isn’t fucking Smucker’s. It’s about weeding out the best from the worst so that the worst become better than the best. I mean look around you. $25 drinks, mood lighting, a little shrimp cocktail to go with your Coltrane. And people wonder why jazz is dying. Take it from me, and every Starbucks jazz album only proves my point. There are no two words more harmful in the entire English language than “good job”.
Damien Chazelle
Me and Call have always liked to get where we started for, even if it don't make a damn bit of sense.
Larry McMurtry
I was tired of just letting things happen to me and then feeling bad about them.
Stephen King
Without my voice and spirit I am dust. This is not what I want, but what I must.
Mike Bartlett
I won't die. I won't give those ghouls the pleasure. I'll live and grow strong. I'll escape, then hunt them down and make them suffer.
Darren Shan
The thing about a hero, is even when it doesn't look like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, he's going to keep digging, he's going to keep trying to do right and make up for what's gone before, just because that's who he is.
Joss Whedon
Your mother is risking a lot, because she believes in you.
Matthew Quick
Soul mates. They really call themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are ... They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride though life like conjoined jellyfish - expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other's spaces liquidly. Making it look easy.
Gillian Flynn
God, he suddenly understood, was love in its purest form, and in these last months with his children, he had felt His touch as surely as he had heard the music spilling from Ronnie's hands.
Nicholas Sparks
You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.
Thomas Harris
The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.
Ian McEwan
Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn't really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at full pitch, and they wanted to lose. To be dazzled.
Graham Moore
When you begin a new story, your job is to envision, to try to glimpse stuff that doesn't as yet exist. That's what writing is, going out to meet the ghosts of the future. Not out of the past, not the ones that are dead and buried. Ghosts of the future, those who don't exist yet.
Cédric Klapisch
I just tell you what happens. I don't explain it.
Dashiell Hammett
There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he'd learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you - just listen to them.
Terry Hayes
I wouldn’t say “art” as much as “virtue,” in the ancient Greek sense of “andreia” – manly action – or “arete,” excellence. In my experience, Resistance kicks in any time we try to move ourselves from a lower plane to a higher. In other words, when we try to align with the better parts of our nature. This move can be creative (art) or physical (athletics) or it can be ethical, moral or spiritual. Have you ever tried to meditate? I have and it kicks my butt every time. Spiritual stuff is hard! But so is making “cold calls” if you’re opening a new business. Somehow the principle is the same. We’re trying to overcome our natural laziness, selfishness, sloppiness, etc. So I wouldn’t say “art,” I’d say “virtue.
Steven Pressfield
In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful.The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable.This is invaluable for an artist.Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable.The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell."Page 68
Steven Pressfield
When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.
Sidney Sheldon
His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles.
Stephen King
Socrates is flying. No, he is soaring. The wings behind him beat in a calming rhythm while the cool air rushes past. His wings are all that matter, snapping at the rushing wind like the sails of some great sea vessel, the feathery appendages all he is and all he will ever want to be.His back muscles flex with the effort that takes him high above the ground. He feels the effort, of course, but sweeping into the sky does not require much of one. The sensation is pleasurable, even exhilarating. With flight there is freedom beyond description, an ecstasy bordering on sexual.He has only one destination, and that is to soar higher, to no longer be a prisoner of the earth. Here destinations seem irrelevant, the world below small. Flying exceeds every pleasure he knows. In the immense forever of blue sky, all that matters is flight and his ability to climb higher.Up and up and up...
Kenneth C. Goldman
When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.
William Boyd
With the right tools, you can write anything ...
Jeff Lyons
Paths cross all the time in this world of ours, sometimes in the strangest places- Charles Jacobs
Stephen King
I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.
Mario Puzo
Yet losing him seemed unbearable. He was the one she loved, the one she would always love, and as he leaned in to kiss her, she gave herself over to him. While he held her close, she ran her hands over his shoulders and back, feeling the strength in his arms. She knew he’d wanted more in their relationship than she’d been willing to offer, but here and now, she suddenly knew she had no other choice. There was only this moment, and it was theirs.
Nicholas Sparks
She couldn’t read his expression. As he started toward her, she recalled the way he’d seemed to glide through the sand the first time she’d ever seen him; she remembered their kiss on the boat dock the night of his sister’s wedding. And she heard again the words she’d said to him on the day they’d said good-bye. She was besieged by a storm of conflicting emotions—desire, regret, longing, fear, grief, love. There was so much to say, yet what could they really begin to say in this awkward setting and with so much time already passed?
Nicholas Sparks
Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers. Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey's Scotch and Poodle's cocaine.
Nick Cave
Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
Ben Hecht
What a writer brought to a book didn't matter as much as what the reader contributed.
Lisa Morton
...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.
Steven Pressfield