Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 84

Trust the tale, not the teller.
Christopher Bram
A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.
Christopher Bram
Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.
Christopher Bram
The truth is that most writers are needy.
Stephen King
As most real writers do, he wrote because he had something to say, not because of any specific ambition to be a writer.
James Hilton
And it’s great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, saying they love the books and the TV show. But there are so many of them and it just doesn’t end. Oh, and ‘selfies’! If I could clap my hands and burn out every camera phone in the world, I swear I’d do it!
George R.R. Martin
If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up.
George R.R. Martin
Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.
Gore Vidal
I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.
Christos Tsiolkas
The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and savagery is there in every important relationship in our lives: with parents, siblings, lovers, our closest friends. I have always wanted to be faithful to that truth.
Christos Tsiolkas
The writer is editor, marketer, blogger, reader, thinker, designer, publisher, public speaker, budget-maker, contract reader, trouble-shooter, coffee-hound, liver-pickler, shame-farmer, god, devil, gibbering protozoa.
Chuck Wendig
Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.
Christos Tsiolkas
I swooned again – I had that moment of falling in love with reading again.
Christos Tsiolkas
I couldn’t admit to any of the boys I hung out with that I wanted to fuck ’em, so my erotic life was in my imagination and in the body.
Christos Tsiolkas
The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.
Christos Tsiolkas
It’s about the possibility, or otherwise, of meaning in the world. And the possibility, or otherwise, of writing. And the possibility, or otherwise, of the resolution of everything into some coherent, cogent vision.
Tom McCarthy
It’s very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that’s something that resonates for me.
Tom McCarthy
I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.' And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. … It’s like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It’s like, ‘Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just…I have to…It’s super important for my law!
Joss Whedon
The face that greeted me, however, was far from welcoming, it was a miniature stick insect of a woman with wiry white hair and enormous glasses that emphasized her heavily wrinkled face. She blinked twice and looked me up and down. By the look on her face, she wasn’t that impressed with what she saw. “Who is it, Ethel?”She responded, “It’s some homeless woman. She looks like she needs money and a good wash.” And I thought I’d already reached the lowest point of my day.
Suzanne Kelman
I soon forgot about my bedraggled appearance. Until, that is, an old man shuffled in and propped himself, hunched and wheezing, over the check-in desk. Karen asked him if he needed assistance. “No,” he grunted sucking on his teeth, “your wet-T-shirt librarian with the punk rock hair is helping me out just fine.
Suzanne Kelman
The ‘coons had enjoyed a real party, and my trashcan had been the piñata! They’d obviously indulged in an evening of feasting on our wares and then staggered off the property loaded up with our birdseed as a little take-home gift!
Suzanne Kelman
Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks … Or Eric Gill’s copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes’s lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan … Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen.
Hanif Kureishi
Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.
Hanif Kureishi
...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.
Stephen King
I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.
Rod Serling
People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate.
Nora Ephron
He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds . . . never in their hearts.
Stephen King
Business or profession?''I guess you'd call me a writer.'No profession,' said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.
Ray Bradbury
The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.
Neil Gaiman
My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness.
Neil Gaiman
When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.
Stephen King
She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.
David Benioff
The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?
Ray Bradbury
Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.
Emma Thompson
I am grateful for the white sheet - all my stories are his.
Mladen Đorđević
I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.
Gore Vidal
I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.
Ray Bradbury
One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.
Raymond Chandler
So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night.
Stephen King
Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
Lillian Hellman
If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.
Helene Hanff
Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
Neil Gaiman
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
Rod Serling
Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine.
Stephen King
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
Stephen King
Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane.
Bruce Robinson
Charity is salt in the wound. It is painful. The state gives charity with the bitter hatred of a victim to his blackmailer. The receiver of free money is subjected to harassment, insult, and profound humiliation. Newspapers are enlisted to heap scorn on the arrogant bastards who choose to beg instead of starve or let their children starve. It is made clear that the poor seek charity as a great and sordid chicanery in which they delight. And there are some who do. As there are people who take delight in sticking hot needles deep into their abdomens, swallow pieces of broken bottles. A special taste. Speaking for humanity in general, the poor accept charity with a shame and loss of self-respect that is truly pitiful.
Mario Puzo
Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.What's it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy?Do they even know I'm HERE?
Ray Bradbury
Then they start going on about cancer and how organic living is the way forward, totally ignoring how expensive it is to be organic and that there are a lot of people out there grateful if they can afford regular living.
Lisa O'Donnell
Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that too. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren't many 'human beings' left to look, see, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running, jumping, there's no time to study one another. But I guess that's bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.
Ray Bradbury
Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.
Anthony Horowitz
Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.
Ray Bradbury
And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.
James Agee
It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness. Or perhaps, Starling thought, it excited him to see her marked in this particular way. She couldn't tell. The sparks in his eyes flew into his darkness like fireflies down a cave.
Thomas Harris
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
Cormac McCarthy
Darkness is happening," said the leather woman, very quietly. "Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now.
Neil Gaiman
It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo's clamor.
Cormac McCarthy
Sometimes,' Beauty said softly, sipping from her silver goblet, 'everyone needs to let the beast inside them out for a while'. She laughed, a sound like a waterfall meeting the sea and more glitter escaped from her fingertips. 'I like to see it. We all have our dark lusts. We should enjoy them.
Sarah Pinborough
I will kill you if you set me free,' the eyes said. 'Set me free.
Peter S Beagle