Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 90

Language is accurate: you run for your life. If you are dying, leave. If you are suffering, move. There is no other law, only movement.
Amélie Nothomb
The strong do as they will while the weak suffer what they must.
Karen Essex
Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.
Charles Yu
The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.
Neal Shusterman
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
William Nicholson
I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.
Stephen King
Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.
Nicholas Sparks
Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.
Stephen King
Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.
George R.R. Martin
I decided I would not go to court to have my mother declared incompetent, I would not fight. I put the car in drive and hit the gas. I felt as if I'd jumped off a sinking ship and was in a life raft with my little girl, my face turned away from the horror, rowing, rowing, as fast and as hard as I could in the opposite direction.
Kaylie Jones
What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be
Stephen King
I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.
Raymond Chandler
I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.
Stephen King
We make our own symbols, after the event has passed and begun to spoil.
Françoise Sagan
One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it.
Raymond Chandler
He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.
Larry McMurtry
We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.
John Banville
Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.
Stephen King
At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was 'We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it'. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking had no latch, let alone a lock.
Stephen King
But you know what they say - old milk turns sour but old scores just get sweeter.
Joe Abercrombie
The past looks worse the closer you look at it.
Hanif Kureishi
I realize that I don’t know where to start. Not because I’m unsure of my story, but because I’m not sure why I feel compelled to tell it in the first place. What can be achieved by unearthing the past?
Nicholas Sparks
I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield)“But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.
John Irving
But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.
Bret Easton Ellis
It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.
Francesca Marciano
If it’s over, then don’t let the past screw up the rest of your life.
Nicholas Sparks
It's best to be ruthless with the past.
Stephen King
When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.
Stephen King
because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.
Nicholas Sparks
It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.
Jonathan Tropper
That nice feeling when you look in the mirror, and your hair's right for the first time in your life? I don;t think we should base so much on weight, muscles, and a good hair day, but when it happens, it's nice. It really is.
Stephen Chbosky
The past beats inside me like a second heart.
John Banville
My sister said Mary Elizabeth is suffering from low self-esteem, but I told her that she said the same thing about Sam back in November when she started dating Craig, and Sam is completely different. Everything can't be low self-esteem, can it? My sister tried to clarify things. She said that by introducing me to all these great things, Mary Elizabeth gained a "superior position" that she wouldn't need if she was confident about herself. She also said that people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don't, nothing will work out the way they want.
Stephen Chbosky
In Tulsa, a girl would no sooner have run around with unstraightened hair than she would have run around naked. It would have been worse than running around naked, letting everyone see your naps (40).
Martha Southgate
Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed.
Hanif Kureishi
Your self esteem is like a notch below Kafka's.
Woody Allen
There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.
Dennis Lehane
I like the multiplicity of books, because each book is different in the mind of each reader. It's the same with this film - if 300 people are in a cinema watching it, they will all see a different film, so in a way there are thousands of different versions of "Caché (Hidden)". The point being that, despite what TV shows us, and what the news stories tell us, there is never just one truth, there is only personal truth.
Michael Haneke
Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.
Robert McKee
It's basically a joke." "I think it's cool," Julian says. "It's all about control, right?" He considers something. "It's not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you're also one of the producers--" I cut him off. "Why have you been tracking this?" "It's a big deal and--" "Julian, it's a movie," I say. "Why have you been tracking this? It's just another movie." "Maybe for you." "What does that mean?" "Maybe for others it's something else," Julian says. "Something more meaningful." "I get where you're coming from, but there's a vampire in it.
Bret Easton Ellis
I have no rules. For me, it's a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You're looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance and want it to be something you can see a second time, and then I'd like it to be something you can see 10 years later, and it becomes a different movie, because you're a different person. So that means I want it to be deep, not in a pretentious way, but I guess I can say I am pretentious in that I pretend. I have aspirations that the movie should trigger off a lot of complex responses.
David Cronenberg
To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.
Roger Ebert
No, no, it's not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
Ray Bradbury
So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
Ray Bradbury
He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.
Ian McEwan
Wait a minute, I'm thinking, was this another one of those conversations where what is meant and what is being said are not the same thing?
Peter Hedges
As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here’s one answer that might apply to a Star Trek movie... I want it to be about the most horrible, treacherous aliens ever known to man who are about to destroy life as we know it, leading to the most spectacular thrill ride of an adventure with fantastic space battles and huge explosions and great special effects -- a white knuckle ride for the movie audience. Yeah, but what’s it about?I can write space battles with the best of them, but what makes that space battle interesting to me is: why are they fighting? What are the stakes? What does the hero lose if he loses? And what does he win if he wins? Why should we care? I'm talking about the second level of story-telling. The level that examines what's going on inside the characters — their moral and ethical dilemmas, their doubts, fears, inner conflicts, how they change as the story progresses. These are the things that make us, as members of an audience, get emotionally involved.
Michael Piller
But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.
David Cronenberg
We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.
David Cronenberg
When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don’t matter to you; you don’t bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.
Federico Fellini
Are you in pain?' I asked, because I know that everything in the world that matters shows up as some kind of pain. Or pang. Joy included.
Andrea Seigel
After all, a man's life, when all is said and done, should serve some greater purpose than that of a hero in a cautionary tale.
Judd Trichter
But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse … I mean obviously Rothko.
John Logan
I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?
A.M. Homes
Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world.
Cormac McCarthy
Do you know why books such as this are so important? They have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me, it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass screaming past an infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper the more literary you are. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail.
Ray Bradbury
The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.
Stephen King
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
Cormac McCarthy
I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?
Jesse Andrews
Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North - meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.
Steven Pressfield