Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 88

Any weapon's only as good as the man using it, and a good man can make a good weapon out of most anything.
Peter Benchley
How could I tell Clarence that finding another dead body was anything but dreadful? On the contrary: it was thrilling; it was exciting; it was exhilarating, it was invigorating; to say nothing of electrifying and above all, satisfying.How could I tell the dear man that murder made me feel so gloriously alive?
Alan Bradley
Murder was so trivial in the stories Harold loved. Dead bodies were plot points, puzzles to be reasoned out. They weren't brothers. Plot points didn't leave behind grieving sisters who couldn't find their shoes.
Graham Moore
On Westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century.
Graham Moore
Those who fail to understand mystery are doomed to crack it
Dean Cavanagh
How shall I typify what happened? Passion play? Somewhat. Weird tale? Indubitably. Horror story? Pretty close. Grotesque melodrama? Certainly. Black comedy? Your point of view will determine that. Perhaps it was a combination of them all... So, to the story. A chronicle of greed and cruelty, horror and rapacity, sadism and murder. Love, American style.
Richard Matheson
As far as I'm concerned, you can't beat a good whodunnit: the twists and turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn't seen it from the start.
Anthony Horowitz
As Daffy once said, the best place to hide a glum countenance is onstage at the opera.
Alan Bradley
In the darkest corner of a darkened room, all Sherlock Homes stories begin. In the pregnant dim of gaslight and smoke, Holmes would sit, digesting the day's papers, puffing on his long pipe, injecting himself with cocaine. He would pop smoke rings into the gloom, waiting for something, anything, to pierce into the belly of his study and release the promise of adventure; of clues to interpret; of, at last he would plead, a puzzle he could not solve. And after each story he would return here, into the dark room, and die day by day of boredom. The darkness of his study was his cage, but also the womb of his genius.
Graham Moore
My mother believed in all superstitions, plus she made some up.
Donald E. Westlake
I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again.
Steve Hamilton
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so - which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end.
Paul Auster
I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
Cormac McCarthy
I don't know anything!' Tim(Caleb) wailed.He'd never spoken a truer word in his life.
Anthony Horowitz
Nice day for a funeral.
Anthony Horowitz
Every solution to every problem is simple. It's the distance between the two where the mystery lies.
Derek Landy
Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
Cormac McCarthy
Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.
Mark Haddon
I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.
Ray Bradbury
It always rains on the unloved-wet dreams-a fishing expedition-she kisses wyverns (the disneyland analogy)-dinner etiquette and chocolate lovers-desire swears by the first circle-"things are changing"-what can possibly go wrong?
Neil Gaiman
Jelly had no brain per se but was in essence all brain, a shared consciousness programmed for desire. He had an appetite for everything, voraciously absorbing the culture that surrounded him and becoming it, only louder. In other words, he was extremely teenaged.
Larry Doyle
You might say that S. has only himself to blame, that it is entirely his choice to fight this fight, to live a life of vigilant somnolence or somnolent vigilantism, to allow himself to be satisfied with Sola in the margins of his manuscripts instead of in his arms, and you might be right. But you ought to understand, too, that there's an attrition that takes place inside, one in which options and choices and even desires are ground ever smaller until finally their existence can no longer be confirmed by observation or weight or displacement but only by faith. Until desire is a ghost.
Doug Dorst
[Dream] I do not want a grape.[Desire] I could make you want one.
Neil Gaiman
He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.
David Nicholls
Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals, which is why we have such a need of them. Desire mocks all human endeavour and makes it worthwhile. Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent – no wonder people want it arrested and kept in a safe place. And just when we think we've got desire under control it lets us down or fills us with hope. Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all.
Hanif Kureishi
It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.
Charles Yu
When had I tamed myself? It had been a lengthy apprenticeship, begun when I was as young as ten, and continued relentlessly throughout my adolescence, when I had discovered to my own terror that I wanted to murder somebody: my father, a sarcastic friend, my professor of Latin and Greek, even a rude passerby. It was not until I was almost twenty that I began to suspect that, along with the repression of my violent impulses, I had repressed everything, even my ability to experience a profound emotion, even my impulse to do good deeds and help others. I had become as good as I had hoped to be, but good with the cautious detachment of one who never indulges in excess.
Domenico Starnone
Nothing lasts forever,' Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.'Except maybe for love,' Ben said.'And desire,' Beverly said.
Stephen King
Because all the waters of the ocean won't fill a bucket with a hole in it. And that's their fall, and that's their fellowship. Desire. The hole in the bucket: the gulf of yearning into which the soul empties itself.
Mike Carey
Desire never stops. Equilibrium is temporary. The self-revelation is never simple, and it cannot guarantee the hero a satisfying life from that day forward. since a great story is always a living thing, its ending is no more final and certain than any other part of the story.
John Truby
If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there's nothing left to wait for.
Neil Gaiman
When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.
Jeff Lindsay
Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.
Robert McKee
I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love - drawn to their objects of desire like butterflies to a candle-flame.
Neil Gaiman
I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?
Neil Gaiman
And Desire smiles, and forgets, for Desire is a creature of the moment.
Neil Gaiman
You need to know it's your actions that will make you a good person, not desire.
Matthew Quick
But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.
Neil Gaiman
Rejection isn't failure. Failure is giving up. Everybody gets rejected. It's how you handle it that determines where you'll end up.
Richard Castle
Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.
Neil Gaiman
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview(Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
Ray Bradbury
Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure.
Steven Pressfield
A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan Mountstuart. Perhaps I will surprise them all, yet.
William Boyd
By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
Stephen King
And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.
Jeff Lindsay
When we go to the fair in disguise, we never win at archery or at singlestick. We do get some nice compliments on our disguises, but no more than that.
Peter S Beagle
Simplicity takes time, patience & practice. Complexity offers too many excuses for failure
Dean Cavanagh
When failing spectacularly the trick is to employ an inverted Schadenfreude. Take ownership of your misfortune.
Dean Cavanagh
Still, failure, success, what is it? Whae gies a fuck. We aw live, then we die, in quite a short space ay time n аw. That's it; end ay fuckin story.
Irvine Welsh
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
J.K. Rowling
Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged.
J.K. Rowling
Today he failed to change the world. As for tomorrow, who can tell?
Neal Shusterman
Your failure is measured by your aspirations. Aspire not, and you cannot fail. Columbus died in chains. Joan or Arc was burned at the stake. Let us all live snugly -- and life will soon be little more than a thick, gelatinous stream of comfortability and ignorance.
Myles Connolly
Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two.
J.K. Rowling
Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from failure is that it's entirely possible you will have another failure.
Nora Ephron
But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment --in short, for the true talent for catastrophe -- Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day.Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganized enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.
George MacDonald Fraser
...I am better Thoughtful Prince than King. Potential holds appeal since in its castle wallsOne is protected from the awful shameOf failure.
Mike Bartlett
I coulda' had class. I coulda' been a contender! But instead I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.
Budd Schulberg
You have to be free to fail in this world.
J.K. Rowling
When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.
Stephen King