Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 62

The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.
Steven Pressfield
Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City...
Christy Hall
I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.
Christy Hall
My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!
Christy Hall
You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer!" Miss Frost said. "It's not a career choice.
John Irving
You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they've taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can't understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don't have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.
Ray Bradbury
Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God’s fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page.
Hanif Kureishi
She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle. She was so much finer than I, so much more honest, that I was sick of myself and I could not look at her warm eyes, I suppressed the shiver brought on by her brown arms around my neck and the long fingers in my hair. I did not kiss her. She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed.
John Fante
The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man’s most fatal creation, the devil’s kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women.
Hanif Kureishi
If you want to be a writer, then write.
I. Marlene King
It's not a career for anyone who needs or values security. It's a career for gamblers. Every time you write a book you roll the dice again.
George R.R. Martin
There's a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation.
Shonda Rhimes
I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
Roald Dahl
When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time.
Stephen King
Do you drink?""Of course,I just said I was a writer.
Stephen King
And I understood why he didn’t need friends or to be accepted at our shitty racist high school, because he had his music, and that was so much better than anything we had to offer.
Matthew Quick
For it is one thing to declare one's love for someone and quite another to accept that loving that person requires sacrificing one's dreams.
Nicholas Sparks
AUNT SHADIE:I see you - and don't worry, you're not white.ROSE:I'm pretty sure I'm white. I'm English.AUNT SHADIE:White is blindness - it has nothing to do with the colour of your skin.
Marie Clements
Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?
Jeff Lindsay
You're insane!""I won't argue that point.
Ray Bradbury
You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.
Stephen King
That's how you should be. Accept your burden and carry it, with joy.
John Ajvide Lindqvist
Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.
Hanif Kureishi
I have more concern for my nephew's welfare than for Lannister pride.
George R.R. Martin
I don't know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don't consider, especially if they're young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity.
Angel Wagenstein
After all we'd been through, we still couldn't take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other's throats.
Max Brooks
The nobility of England would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount. But you'll labor like scholars over a bulldog's pedigree.
Robert Bolt
Do you want it bad enough to get over being hurt?
Richard Castle
A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff.
Stephen King
He did not smile. 'We are the keepers of the world's greatest treasures. Does that mean nothing to you?' "My children are my greatest treasures,' she said. 'Stone no matter how old, means nothing to me when compared to their welfare.
Karen Essex
Our people once were warriors. But unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit. If my spirit can survive living with you for eighteen years, then I can survive anything.
Alan Duff
When a man's pride is injured, death is a small price to repay the insult.
James Clavell
•tThey’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and they’re so proud of themselves, and so puffed up from being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.
Neil Gaiman
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, swabjockies, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candyasses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has 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 desk jockey, because this is war, baby, and war is hell.
Steven Pressfield
Pride ill becomes a beggar, ser.
George R.R. Martin
It was flawless, correct, and beautiful. 'This is mine,' he said to himself. He felt tears well up in his eyes, tears of joy. Oh, what a blessing it was to be a man, to create, to labor and produce such a great thing - to be alive! It was a splendid thing he had done! He rose from his desk and looked down on the neat pile of paper before him with a smile and eyes narrowed in fierce, immaculate greed. He raised his arms in triumph, fists clenched, and laughed once. What a glorious thing is pride! It is almost an end in itself! No wonder churchmen preached against it! A truly proud man is not to be found in their flocks of souls humbled by the rumor of a great invisible wizard and the inexplicable! If it is a sin to feel such pride, then it is a sin to be a man!
Edward Cline
A hedge knight must hold tight to his pride. Without it, he was no more than a sellsword
George R.R. Martin
The privacy of pride.
Guy Gavriel Kay
And metaphors like cats behind your smile,Each one wound up to purr,each one a pride,Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)
Ray Bradbury
You wear your honor like a suit of armor... You think it keeps you safe, but all it does is weigh you down and make it hard for you to move.
George R.R. Martin
When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in which you guys have inhabited this world, this universe, has made you part of it, part of the story. You are living in Firefly. When I see you guys, I don’t think the show is off the air. I don’t think there’s a show; I think that’s what the world is like. … The story is our lives.
Joss Whedon
What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.
Erich Segal
He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.
Darren Shan
My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.
Emma Thompson
Life is ironic. Some people use their terrible childhood as an excuse of their unfortunate rest of the life… while others create a masterpiece out of their terrible childhood, they create a story loved by the entire world.
Nino Varsimashvili
You're in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no.
Peter S Beagle
His story is simple, because simple is always best.
Stephen King
Story to me is life. It’s purpose. We as humans have an the opportunity and obligation to live the most truthful story ever told, unfortunately so few ever live truthfully. They don’t follow their dreams and live lives filled with regrets and “what ifs”. I make it my purpose to pursue the dreams and life that I want. It’s very hard, but at the end of the day, when people read the story of my life, they will say, “He was true to himself”.
Aaron Denius Garcia
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.
Robert McKee
All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story.
Bryan Fuller
You do not keep the audience's interest by giving it information, but by withholding information ....
Robert McKee
I decided that a story was anything that I made up that kept the reader turning the pages or watching, and did not leave the reader or the viewer feeling cheated at the end.
Neil Gaiman
A great story can change the world.
Stewart Stafford
I am dust and my story ends here.
Hanif Kureishi
Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. Writers who cannot grasp this truth, the truth of conflict, writers who have been misled by the counterfeit comforts of modern life into believing that life is easy once you know how to play the game. These writers give conflict a false inflection. The scripts they write fail for one of two reasons, either a glut of banal conflict or a lack of meaningful conflict. The former are exercises in turbo special effects written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict but because they're disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise overwrought excuses for mayhem. The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself, these writers take the pollyanna view, that life would really be nice if it weren't for conflict. What writers at these extremes fail to realize is that while the quality of conflict in life changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict is constant. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level. When, for example, we don't have to work from dawn to dark to put bread on the table, we now have time to reflect on the great conflict within our mind and heart or we may become aware of the terrible tyrannies and suffering in the world at large. As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, "The essence of reality is scarcity. There isn't enough love in the world, enough food, enough justice, enough time in life. To gain any sense of satisfaction in our life we must go in to heady conflict with the forces of scarcity. To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict at one or all three levels of our lives.
Robert McKee
I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don’t entertain, nobody’s listening.
Budd Schulberg
It's a very remarkable story.""Remarkable's a well-chosen word. It doesn't give you away.
James Hilton
Every story is informed by a worldview.
Brian Godawa
No story lives unless someone wants to listen. So thank you, all of you.
J.K. Rowling
Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?
Nicholas Sparks