Quotes by Directors - Page 21

They tell us to count our blessings whilst they count the coffers
Dean Cavanagh
Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.
Yukio Mishima
When teenagers aren’t turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they’re as stiff as Puritans.
Stephen King
He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn’t care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That’s the solution.
Stephen King
[the only acting advice he would give] What is acting but lying and what is good lying but convincing lying?
Laurence Olivier
If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone
Stephen King
Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.
Jonathan Nolan
I hear her slip into bed with him, and I hear everything that happens after that. Sex is such a strange and sloppy business, why bother to recount every slurp and moan that ensued? Tom and Honey deserve their privacy, and for that reason I will end my report of the night's activities here. If some readers object, I ask them to close their eyes and use their imaginations.
Paul Auster
When it was done and I went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something that had been getting close in the dark was suddenly gone. It could not stay. It had been banished. It knew how to come back, I was sure of that, but it could not stay and I could really go to sleep. My heart cracked with gratitude. I think it was the first gratitude I’ve ever really known. I lay there beside you and the tears rolled down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. I don’t care if you understand me. Understanding is vastly overrated, but nobody ever gets enough safety. I’ve never forgotten how safe I felt with that thing gone out of the darkness.
Stephen King
I couldn't imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of my life that had ended for me, and here was my chance to set out on a fresh course
Paul Auster
It’s about running wild in a field of exclamation points chasing question marks
Natasha Tsakos
For several years Quinn had been having the same conversations with this man, whose name he did not know. Once, when he had been in the luncheonette, they had talked about baseball, and now, each time Quinn came in, they continued to talk about it. In the winter, the talk was of trades, predictions, memories. During the season, it was always the most recent game. They were both Mets fans, and the hopelessness of that passion had created a bond between them.
Paul Auster
I’m going crazy, Louis thought wonderingly. Wheeeeee!
Stephen King
My wife converted me to religion. I never believed in hell until I married her.
Hal Roach
He did it (listened) as the world's most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet.
Stephen King
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
Stephen King
Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.
Stephen King
You never know whether you've already experienced your greatest moment or your worst
Dean Cavanagh
WHAT? YOU AGAIN?' he shouted in capital letters.
Noel Langley
I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.
Stephen King
And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.
Stephen King
Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.
Stephen King
You’re a dreamer, boy,” he said. “Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it’s nevergoing to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don’t give a damn about money, and you’retoo much of a philosopher to have any feeling for art. What am I going to do with you? You needsomeone to look after you, to make sure you have food in your belly and a bit of cash in your pocket.Once I’m gone, you’ll be right back where you started.
Paul Auster
[L]ife is more than just steering a course around pain.
Stephen King
You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold'. You knew, but you didn't understand." He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?
Stephen King
I've got a theory, it could be bunnies...I've got a theor-Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposesThey've got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses.And what's with all the carrots-?What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?Bunnies, bunnies it must be bunnies!...or maybe midgets...
Joss Whedon
Was there even such a thing as normall? People had terrible things behing their faces sometimes. He knew that now.
Stephen King
... good advice was sometimes easier to give than receive.
Stephen King
Those modern analysts they charge so much! In my day for five marks Freud himself would treat you. For ten marks he would treat you and press your pants. For fifteen marks Freud would let you treat him - that included a choice of any two vegetables.
Woody Allen
Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes
Bertolt Brecht
There was a madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood.
Stephen King
I can certainly identify with The Villain. A Villain is someone who has a past, who is strongly opinionated, fearless, doesn't get intimated by anything, and went beyond suffering. It's an empowerment figure.
Nuno Roque
The most interesting of the classic movie genres to me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the Frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in the East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by the masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.
Martin Scorsese
I probably have more female friends than any man I've ever met. What I like about them is that almost always they're generally mentally tougher, and they're better listeners, and they're more capable of surviving things. And most of the women that I like have a haunted quality - they're sort of like women who live in a haunted house all by themselves.
John Malkovich
Never put off writing until you are better at it.
Gary Henderson
I create other worlds, magical never-never lands where the camera is my weapon and the battles I fight are with the elements. i stretch the laws of the mind and displace people from their realities to capture a side of them they didn’t even know they had. Photography has the ability to freeze people in this time and space—no matter what happens after that moment, it cannot change—they are exactly how i want them to be.
Tyler Shields
Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
Sometimes being an actor is like being some kind of detective where you're on the search for a secret that will unlock the character.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
There is no such thing as a world without combat, no civilization which doesn't start off by laying down the rules for relations between people. But the rules are there for the weak. The strong man experiments to find out how far they can be stretched, he creates his own rules. You would like everything to be based on the goodwill and charity of one's fellow men. But if there is no private profit to be made, there will be no progress.
Henning Mankell
Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.
Stephen King
Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society”. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
Stephen King
Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.
Paul Haggis
That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don’t happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered.
Paul Auster
Memory is the basis of every journey.
Stephen King
...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.
Stephen King
Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.
Stephen King
Maybe the price of forgetting that even in America, even in New York City, when a man from back home is talking, you better listen closely. (Dark City Lights)
Brian Koppelman
I have the nagging sense that my true friends are waiting for me, beyond college, unusual women whose ambitions are as big as their past transgressions, whose hair is piled high, dramatic like topiaries at Versailles, and who never, ever say "too much information" when you mention a sex dream you had about your father.
Lena Dunham
I'm a Joker. Dangerous and silly at the same time.
Nuno Roque
I didn't get the impression that the policeman cared much about the whole thing either. After another thirty minutes of ruthless interrogation ('Can you ve'fy you eat banan' pancake?') he let me go asking me not to leave Khao San within 24 hours
Alex Garland
The narrator, a time traveler from 2011, scoffs at the despondency caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis -- especially the drug and alcohol use of a resident of 1962 he supposedly cares about. Then he finds his compassion because he remembers he is the exception in being able to see beyond the immediate -- and foreboding -- horizon.
Stephen King
Words tend to last a big longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear - flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands - and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.
Paul Auster
At the end of the day I have many answers for it. It has to do with my mom, who was an extraordinary woman, and a great feminist. It has to do with the people in my life. It has to do with a lot of different things, but -- I don't know! Because I'm not just writing from the female characters for other people. I have a desire to see them in our culture -- that was not met for most of my childhood. Except occasionally by James Cameron. [From the 2011 San Diego Comic Con, in response to being asked why he writes strong female characters.]
Joss Whedon
It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything.
Stephen King
...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.
Stephen King
The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.
George. C. Scott
Fiction is the truth inside a lie.
Stephen King
Of course it's heavier, he thought. It's got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.
Stephen King
The tales of pure terror, of course, are completely naturalistic in their content, and must stand or fall by their merit alone. But what about the supernatural stories? Can we, the children of a scientific age, give any credence to these medleys of devils, ghosts, and other psychical invasions? There is only one answer: we can and do. We are dealing with stories, not with scientific dissertations. And if, as stories, they have the ring of truth, we'll believe them, as stories, implicitly.("Introduction")
Herbert A. Wise
I think the young actor who really wants to act will find a way ... to keep at it and seize every opportunity that comes along.
Sir John Gielgud