Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 83

What you really want is all too often hidden just behind what you think you want.
Christy Hall
Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.
Christy Hall
That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up.
John Irving
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
Mark Haddon
I write because that is what I am supposed to do.
Christy Hall
Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.All are continually asking, "What does this represent? What does it stand for?"They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.
Steven Pressfield
Nostalgia!" Miss Frost cried. "You´re nostalgic!" She repeated. "Just how old are you, William?" She asked."Seventeen, " I told her."Seventeen!" Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. "Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!
John Irving
Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done.
Gillian Flynn
A writer writes. There are no exceptions to this reality. No excuses. Stop wasting time talking about your stories and get them on paper.
Christy Hall
As you near a finish line, do not slow down. Instead, run faster. Give all you have left until it is done. It is then that you may collapse.
Christy Hall
According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.
John Irving
Don't be afraid of what you're creating.
Christy Hall
I know it's difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.
Christy Hall
It's hard to be a dreamer sometimes. I'm tired.
Christy Hall
No.'It's not a bad word. And it is very important to use at times. Practice saying it in the mirror. It's empowering.
Christy Hall
I am swimming in a sea of words, attempting to keep my head above water.
Christy Hall
Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all.
Christy Hall
I have written until I fell asleep with my computer on my lap. That can't be normal.
Christy Hall
The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me.
Christy Hall
I'm not gonna lie...sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.
Christy Hall
Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days...it will demand absolutely everything of you.
Christy Hall
That moment you realize you are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right reasons.
Christy Hall
Nothing is louder than silence.
Christy Hall
I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.
Christy Hall
When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete...you feel as if you could do anything.
Christy Hall
Give all that you can. No more. No less. Every. Single. Day.
Christy Hall
It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you've sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.
Steven Pressfield
You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
Nick Hornby
Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him!
John Irving
The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.
Steven Pressfield
Each night, I close my eyes and dream. In the morning, I open my eyes again, but the dreaming doesn't stop.
Christy Hall
Sometimes I dream so vividly, so expectantly, I wonder if I'm crazy...
Christy Hall
Good writers can't die. Their words live on forever.
Kensington Gore
Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.
Christopher Bram
Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.
Christopher Bram
Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.
Christopher Bram
The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.
Christopher Bram
Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.
Christopher Bram
History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.
Christopher Bram
A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.
Christopher Bram
It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.
Christopher Bram
Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?
Christopher Bram
Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.
Christopher Bram
An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.
Christopher Bram
Gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books – it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love.
Christopher Bram
Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).
Christopher Bram
In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.
Christopher Bram
A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people’s lives.
Christopher Bram
Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.
Christopher Bram
A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?
Christopher Bram
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.
Christopher Bram
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.
Christopher Bram
Everybody is Other in Maupin.
Christopher Bram
Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.
Christopher Bram
Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.
Christopher Bram
We’re happier when the assholes are villains.
Christopher Bram
Death is almost never timely, even for the old.
Christopher Bram
Art is long and life is short.
Christopher Bram
There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.
Christopher Bram
Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.
Christopher Bram