Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 65

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.
Christopher Markus
Disappointment will come when your effort does not give you the expected return. If things don’t go as planned or if you face failure. Failure is extremely difficult to handle, but those that do come out stronger. What did this failure teach me? is the question you will need to ask. You will feel miserable. You will want to quit, like I wanted to when nine publishers rejected my first book. Some IITians kill themselves over low grades – how silly is that? But that is how much failure can hurt you. But it’s life. If challenges could always be overcome, they would cease to be a challenge. And remember – if you are failing at something, that means you are at your limit or potential. And that’s where you want to be. Disappointment’ s cousin is Frustration, the second storm. Have you ever been frustrated? It happens when things are stuck. This is especially relevant in India. From traffic jams to getting that job you deserve, sometimes things take so long that you don’t know if you chose the right goal. After books, I set the goal of writing for Bollywood, as I thought they needed writers. I am called extremely lucky, but it took me five years to get close to a release. Frustration saps excitement, and turns your initial energy into something negative, making you a bitter person. How did I deal with it? A realistic assessment of the time involved – movies take a long time to make even though they are watched quickly, seeking a certain enjoyment in the process rather than the end result – at least I was learning how to write scripts, having a side plan – I had my third book to write and even something as simple as pleasurable distractions in your life – friends, food, travel can help you overcome it. Remember, nothing is to be taken seriously. Frustration is a sign somewhere, you took it too seriously.
Chetan Bhagat
When you know yourself, mirrors turn to glass.
Girish Kohli
Yefgenii said, "The Americans spent millions of dollars designing a pen that would work in space. What did we do?" Gevorkian's head was down, his eyes were down. "What did we do?"Gevorkian lifted his head "We used pencils.""We used pencils.
Jed Mercurio
Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?
Peter S Beagle
Haven't you ever noticed that life is like a series of movies?
Matthew Quick
When one has little faith, one must survive from day to day signs-
Stephen King
You were contemplating the mountain, Mr. Conway?" Came the inquiry."Yes, it's a fine sight. It has a name, I suppose?""It is called Karakal""I don't think I've ever heard of it. Is is very high?""Over twenty-eight thousand feet.""Indeed? I didn't realize there would be anything on that scale outside the Himalayas. Has it been properly surveyed? Whose are the measurements?""Whose would you expect, my dear sir? Is there anything incompatible between monasticism and trigonometry?
James Hilton
And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad... Maybe it's good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think the only perspective is to really be there. Like Sam said. Because it's okay to feel things. And be who you are about them.
Stephen Chbosky
while it’s five in the morning here, it’s also five in the evening somewhere in China—proving that incompatible truths make perfect sense when seen with global perspective.
Neal Shusterman
Elasticity is a fundamental principle of perception,
Neal Shusterman
It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.
Cormac McCarthy
This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?
Cormac McCarthy
Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch?
Jeff Lindsay
A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.
Howard Fast
I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.
Cormac McCarthy
One man’s nonsense is another man’s sense.
Peter Cameron
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
John Irving
Let me tell you something: when you dance, you are the greatest dancer who has ever lived. And when you sing, you will have the courage to raise your voice to the heavens, knowing that you may never get an answer.
Emma Forrest
I stretched out on the bed and slept. It was twilight when I awakened and turned on the light. I felt better, no longer tired. I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. But suppose I failed? Suppose I had lost all of my beautiful talent? Suppose it had burned up in the fire of Biff Newhouse smashing my nose or Helen Brownell dead forever? What would happen to me? Would I go to Abe Marx and become a busboy again? I had seventeen dollars in my wallet. Seventeen dollars and the fear of writing. I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don’t desert me now. I started to write and I wrote:“The time has come,” the Walrus said,“To talk of many things:Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages—and kings—”I looked at it and wet my lips. It wasn’t mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace.
John Fante
Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.
Stephen King
Come on! Who wants to fight me?
John Fante
There are no tragedies in life, only violent coup d’etats on the state of irrational optimism
Dean Cavanagh
I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.
Roberto Rossellini
The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one's pessimism had led to an ethos of fear, and the other's pessimism had led to a noisy, fractious disdain for Everything-That-Was. One shrank, the other flailed. One toed the line, the other crossed it out. Much of the time they were at loggerheads, and because Willy found it so easy to shock his mother, he rarely wasted an opportunity to provoke an argument. If only she'd the wit to back off a little, he probably wouldn't have been so insistent about making his points. Her antagonism inspired him, pushed him into ever more extreme positions, and by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world.
Paul Auster
Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.
Joe Abercrombie
...studies show that in general, optimists die ten years earlier than pessimists.""I find that hard to believe""Of course you do, you're an optimist. You have a misguided belief that things will go your way. You don't see the dangers till it's too late. Pessimists are more realistic. "That seems like a sad way to govern your life.""It's a safe way to govern your life.
Susin Nielsen
No matter how shitty things are, you can always get a song out of it.
Grant Morrison
You may exist inthis world--but I exist tooand I will not yield
Matthew Quick
Everyone has something to hide. And if they couldn't hide it the world would be in a lot worse mess than it is.
Richard Matheson
there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.
Stephen King
I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.
Stephen King
We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply...
Neil Gaiman
Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
Richard Russo
But bad luck makes good stories.
Bernard Evslin
For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
Cormac McCarthy
You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth.
Mike Carey
All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you're selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.
Ramsey Isler
No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I have it doesn’t matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she’d told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.
George R.R. Martin
So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
Neil Gaiman
Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.
Neil Gaiman
- The myths are dead. The gods are dead. The ghosts and ghouls and phantoms are dead. There is only the State, and the People.- No, Monsieur Robespierre. There is much more than that.
Neil Gaiman
My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.
Neil Gaiman
Most of the stories you hear about dragons are fodder for fools.
George R.R. Martin
That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.
Tom Perrotta
Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.
Neil Gaiman
There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men.
Neil Gaiman
When I was a child, I pestered my elders for stories.
Neil Gaiman
People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.
Neil Gaiman
I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don't understand. Never mind.
Peter S Beagle
We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.
Neil Gaiman
I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.
Neil Gaiman
Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)
Neil Gaiman
Because stories start in minds-- they aren't artifacts or natural phenomena.
Neil Gaiman
I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I'm writing it down. It's not true.
Neil Gaiman
Without stories, we are incomplete.
Neil Gaiman
There are gods and there are true knights too. All the stories can't be lies.
George R.R. Martin
Someday an opportunity will come. Think about Harry Potter. His life is terrible, but then a letter arrives, he gets on a train, and everything is different for him afterward. Better. Magical.""That's just a story.""So are we- we're stories too.
Matthew Quick
Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.
Neil Gaiman
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
Stephen King