Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 82

A rock is harder than a feather, you can talk and jabber and make exceptions, but in the end, if you have to choose which one is gonna hit you on the head, you'll choose the feather every single time.
Andrew Klavan
Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.
Neil Gaiman
I started after him...and the clown looked back. I saw Its eyes, and all at once I understood who It was.""Who was it, Don?" Harold Gardner asked softly."It was Derry," Don Hagarty said. "It was this town.
Stephen King
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Gore Vidal
I know [Umbridge] by reputation and I'm sure she's no Death Eater-""She's foul enough to be one...""Yes, but the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters.
J.K. Rowling
It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated. . . .
J.K. Rowling
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
Tom Stoppard
Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
Mae West
You can't ascribe great cosmic significance to a simple earthly event. Coincidence. That's all anything ever is. Nothing more than coYou can't ascribe great cosmic significance to a simple earthly event. Coincidence. That's all anything ever is. Nothing more than co
Scott Neustadter
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka.
Stephen King
If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself… and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.
Stephen King
Quand le doigt montre le ciel, l’imbécile regarde le doigt. [When a finger is pointing up to the sky, only a fool looks at the finger.]
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Their fate rested entirely on me. I could save them by telling the truth. I could destroy them by lying. No one should have that much power.
Neal Shusterman
The hands of fate keep time on a heart-shaped clock.
Darren Shan
To stand up for someone was to stitch your fate into the lining of theirs.
Tom Rob Smith
Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.
Patrick McGrath
When an orphan is depressed," wrote Wilbur Larch, "he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what happens because of it. You must be alert to lie, and stay alert to keep your lie a secret. Orphans are not the masters of their fates; they are the last to believe you if you tell them that other people are also not in charge of theirs. When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know," Dr. Larch wrote. "I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate--your own, and everybody else's.
John Irving
I didn't ask to be made a princess."This time all three of them laugh, although it is gentle enough."Who chooses their fate?" It is the third one, the tallest. "Who asks to be born into the times that are theirs?""Well, who accepts the world only as it comes to them?" she says, too quickly.
Guy Gavriel Kay
A sweet fate oft hides a sinner's heart.
George R.R. Martin
I guess it's funny how life turns out?" she tried. "Not last I checked," Errol said with a snort.
Daniel Handler
At the end of the day,” he continued, “although many believe in fate, it’s those who go through life with independent thought alone who are the strongest.
Adele Rose
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.
Stephen King
A person's name is a fate-conjuring incantation.
Mark Leyner
If you pursue this road that you've embarked upon, you will eventually come to moral decisions that will take you completely by surprise
Cormac McCarthy
He'd once known a man who said that life hinged on the moment, that everything changed in the blink of an eye. Tesseract knew the truth of that as well as anybody. It was in those moments that he struck, after all, snatching people's lives away. He'd always known that it was only a matter of time before one of those moment's worked against him.
Derek Landy
He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
Cormac McCarthy
But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry (of life) will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge of the world that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Cormac McCarthy
He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.
Cormac McCarthy
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
Ian McEwan
You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.
Jim Thompson
But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.
Stephen King
Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.
Jonathan Tropper
Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright.
Mario Puzo
A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley...He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!
J.K. Rowling
What is ordinary to you maybe a desert of woeful newness to another.
Richard Llewellyn
Sometimes, Lev, I just want to smack you.""You already hit him with a car.
Neal Shusterman
Wars have a way reinventing people. And making too many things disappear.-Sonia
Neal Shusterman
Though the gospel amnesty which grace proclaims makes no exceptions, for Divine grace has no limits, there are limits to the time within which the amnesty avails. And if sinners despise grace there is nothing for them but judgment, stern and inexorable.
Robert Anderson
It seems to happen sudden—a fighter gets good. He gets easy and graceful. He learns how to save himself—no energy wasted... he slips and slides— he travels with the punch. . . . Oh, sure, I like the way you're shaping up.
Clifford Odets
Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected.
Chuck Jones
I am as devoted to adventure now as then, and that’s never going to stop.
William Goldman
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.
Federico Fellini
What he'd find there, of course, was up to Pete. But he was sure there were magicians in Tampico and leopard-skins and golden thrones in Juba. Dragons and pirates and white temples where magic dwelt. And best of all, the places he didn't know about yet, the ones that would come as surprises. Oh, not entirely pleasant surprises. There should be a hint of peril, a touch of terror, to emphasize the brightness of adventure...("Before I Wake...")
Henry Kuttner
The world was healing itself.
Anthony Horowitz
Something can be very funny and then suddenly very terrifying-very exciting, and suddenly very ridiculous. I think that’s what life is like, that’s what interests me.
Joss Whedon
Under the moon, the road that ran from the edge of her forest gleamed like water, but when she stepped out onto it, away from the trees, she felt how hard it was, and how long. She almost turned back then; but instead she took a deep breath of the woods air that still drifted to her, and held it in her mouth like a flower, as long as she could.
Peter S Beagle
Art is an adventure. When it ceases to be an adventure, it ceases to be art. Not all of us pursue the inaccessible landscapes of the twelve-tone scale, just as not all of us strive for inaccessible mountain-tops, or glory in storms at sea. But the human incidence is there. Could it be that these two impractical pursuits — of beauty and of adventure’s embrace — are simply two differing profiles of the same uniquely human reality?
Robert Ardrey
It's funny, leaving a place, ain't it?" he said. "You never do know when you'll get back.
Larry McMurtry
Sounds like a great place to get killed. Hard pass.
Jackson Lanzing
Okay, well, on Borelletrox V, the males are kept completely isolated from all images of the female until Binding Day and the females are, erm, let's just say they’ve' got a lot of--
Jackson Lanzing
It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.
Stephen King
What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.
Richard Russo
Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.
J.K. Rowling
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Ian McEwan
Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.
Harlan Ellison
In that moment, Dan was reminded why he wanted to write in the first place. It was the same reason anybody does anything -- to impress women.(Jeremy Goodwin, Sports Night)
Aaron Sorkin
In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.So I would suggest that any attempted seduction of a writer would probably go a great deal easier for all parties if you sent them a cheerful note saying "YOU ARE INVITED TO A SEDUCTION: Please come to dinner on Friday Night, Wear the kind of clothes you would like to be seduced in."And alcohol may help, too. Or kissing. Many writers figure out that they're being seduced or flirted with if someone is actually kissing them.
Neil Gaiman
New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.
Gillian Flynn
I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener.
George R.R. Martin
Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.
Ian McEwan