Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 110

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
Gore Vidal
... Kenny G is extremely talented and resourceful and a powerful force to be reckoned with ... Mr. G might not seem evil, but I fear him more than any other human being.
Matthew Quick
Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.
Stephen King
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.
Tom Schulman
And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshipers of the sun's passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don't keep the schedule tight.
Harlan Ellison
You're different. And I'm different too. Different is good. But different is hard. Believe me, I know.
Matthew Quick
Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.
David Mamet
He liked murder. Murder and long walks had been two of his favorite things when he was younger.
Derek Landy
Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.
Ray Bradbury
Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen King
No," said the cat. "Now, you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.
Neil Gaiman
How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
Cormac McCarthy
On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.
Mark Haddon
Oddly, the burned hand didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real.
Stephen King
You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn’t mine. It never has been.
Cormac McCarthy
What would come, would come...and you would have to meet it, when it did.
J.K. Rowling
Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.
David Cronenberg
I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn’t anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops… Every goddamned restaurant I go to, it’s always the same way… They’ll have some old bag on the payroll — I figure they keep her locked up in the mop closet until they see me coming. And they’ll doll her up in the dirtiest goddamned apron they can find and smear that crappy red polish all over her fingernails, and everything about her is smeary and sloppy and smelly. And she’s the dame that always waits on me.
Jim Thompson
Are you lovers?""Excuse me?""Do you mind my asking you?""Yes.""It's off the record.""Then why do you need to know?"Daniel Moore smiled. A large, happy smile."Because I would like to ask you to dinner.
Francesca Marciano
Hackers are nerdy, pasty, tubby, little geeks with triple thick glasses and this is probably a demented otaku with smelly feet. So catching him will be a breeze!
Keiko Nobumoto
She’s a gray woman with gray sayings.” “A crape-hanger.
Benedict Freedman
Ambition is destruction only competence matters.
Jill Robinson
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
Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.
Neil Gaiman
It’s a case of mistaken identity. It’s one big mistake. You weren’t even in the country when it happened.”Maja in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
I am as devoted to adventure now as then, and that’s never going to stop.
William Goldman
Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.
Ian McEwan
That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl--and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor's house--was a slap in Mary-Love's face. She decided, without saying anything more to James, to wreck Grace's perfection of happiness. Grace would learn that she, Mary-Love, was the source of all felicity within the Caskey family.
Michael McDowell
I am the sword in the darkness.
George R.R. Martin
She needs to sort out her priorities
J.K. Rowling
The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.
Bret Easton Ellis
I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I'm writing it down. It's not true.
Neil Gaiman
The most successful people in the most impossible situations are the ones that are sure they're gonna get out of it, and they go on thinking that, even if they die trying.
Lori Lansens
It was possible that he was making some progress in his mental health condition by seeing me.
Holly Goldberg Sloan
Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father's pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.
Dennis Lehane
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.
Ray Bradbury
It was only when the giant got halfway down the incline that he suddenly, happily, burst into flame and continued his trip saying, "NO SURVIVORS, NO SURVIVORS!" in a manner that could only indicate deadly sincerity.It was seeing him happily burning and advancing that startled the Brute Squad to screaming. And once that happened, why, everybody panicked and ran...
William Goldman
Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it’s good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.) The reasons for writing about the day after tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that follow it, are as many and as varied as the people writing.
Neil Gaiman
You have no idea how much the last few days have meant to me," I began. "Meeting you has been the best thing that's ever happened to me." I hesitated, know that if I stopped now, I'd never be able to say it to anyone. "I love you," I whispered. "Did you ever imagine something like this?" she wondered aloud. "You and me , I mean?" "No," I said. "It scares me a little." My stomach flipped, and all at once, I was sure she didnt feel the same way. "You dont have to say it back to me," I began. "That's not why I said it--" "I know," she interrupted. "You don't understand. I wasnt scared because you told me. I got scared because I wanted to say it, too: I love you, John.
Nicholas Sparks
Madame Kovarian: The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules.The Doctor: Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.
Steven Moffat
atheists are the most faithful people I ever met
Dean Cavanagh
If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions.
Quentin Tarantino
All right, the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is that we create the dream for him. If you can understand that, if you can wrap your mind around it, then you can conjure up anything you want from out of the ether. Provided this is material enough to do it.
C. Robert Cargill
People do incredibly stupid things when they are frightened
Kirsten Beyer
A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY
Roald Dahl
In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And . . . that's it, I think.
Emma Forrest
I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.
Alan Bradley
Never believe anything you hear at a woman’s tit.
George R.R. Martin
It took me a long time to discover your weakness, Albus Potter. I thought it was pride, I thought it was the need to impress your father, but then I realised your weakness was the same as your father's - friendship.
J.K. Rowling
enjoying life should be of much greater concern than understanding it.
Will Fetters
So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o' the wisp. Not long ago you burned--your heart burned--in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all.""Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own? I have given my heart to another.""The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?""Yes.""You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do.""Nonetheless, he has my heart. I hope your sisters will not be too hard on you, when you return to them without it.
Neil Gaiman
There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.
Ian McEwan
The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.
Thomas Harris
True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.
Robert McKee
Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived.Anarchy in black.
Mark Millar
Sounds like a great place to get killed. Hard pass.
Jackson Lanzing
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
When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.
Jim Henson
Muggles have garden gnomes, too, you know," Harry told Ron as they crossed the lawn."Yeah, I've seen those things they think are gnomes," said Ron, bent double with his head in a peony bush, "like fat little Santa Clauses with fishing rods...
J.K. Rowling
It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.
Stephen King