Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 114

Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.
Stephen King
That's the first rule of survival in enemy waters: volunteer nothing.
James Clavell
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough. He pulled out his book.
Neil Gaiman
If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.
Neil Gaiman
Sherman Reilly Duffy of the pre-World War I CHICAGO DAILY JOURNAL once told a cub reporter, 'Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.' Well, socially I fit in just fine between the whore and the bartender. Both are close friends. And I knew the world was round. Yet, as time went by I found myself confronted with the ugly suspicion that the world was, after all, flat and that there were things dark and terrible waiting just over the edge to reach out and snatch life from the unlucky, unwary wanderer.
Jeff Rice
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
Stephen King
you have to be the prude or the slut, and if you pick one, other people hate you for it, and you can’t trust anyone anymore, because they’re all after the same thing, and you see that you can never go back to how was before…
Ned Vizzini
It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
Ian McEwan
Clearly the secret of happiness...is a variation on the general principle of banging your head against a wall, and then stopping.
Stef Penney
I mean, I tried to change, I did, everybody tries to change, Michael. Not just the queerboys. You look in the mirror and all you see is what's wrong, I'm not _this_ enough or I'm not _that_ enough, and you spend your whole life trying to fix yourself, because you just want to be okay inside your head, you know?I know you know this, Michael, that's why you're here. You're looking for the fix. Yeah, that's why they call it a fix. Because you think you're broken. Only you're not--that broken feeling? That's normal. That's how you know you're normal. If you're not feeling it, you really are broken, that's the joke
David Gerrold
Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all.
Tom Stoppard
Hmmm... that's interesting.""What?""There seems to be a gentleman walking towards us with a shotgun.
Derek Landy
To err is human - but it feels divine.
Mae West
Character assassination of a politician is a victimless crime
Dean Cavanagh
We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply...
Neil Gaiman
…Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too.
Richard Matheson
If we'd never met, I think I would have known my life wasn't complete. And I would have wandered the world in search of you, even if I didn't know who I was looking for
Nicholas Sparks
It's an election year. We would prefer that voters didn't use common sense.
Aaron Sorkin
We are servants of the Mystery. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us. Every breath we take, every heartbeat, every evolution of every cell comes from God and is sustained by God every second, just as every creation, invention, every bar of music or line of verse, every thought, vision, fantasy, every dumb-ass flop and stroke of genius comes from that infinite intelligence that created us and the universe in all its dimensions, out of the Void, the field of infinite potential, primal chaos, the Muse. To acknowledge that reality, to efface all ego, to let the work come through us and give it back freely to its source, that, in my opinion, is as true to reality as it gets.
Steven Pressfield
I have a mouth for kisses / No one to give or to take / I have a heart in my bosom / Beating for nobody's sake.
Lana Citron
Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.
Stephen King
To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.
Ray Bradbury
Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world.
Cormac McCarthy
What I have learned in this life is you can never be ashamed of where you come from.
Tyler Perry
Gillman smiles, in the cold manner of an assassin. It's like looking in the mirror.
Irvine Welsh
Forget about weird Boy and move on
Laura J. Burns
Sex is an emotion in motion.
Mae West
...there are worse things than losing the girl.
Stephen King
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
Cormac McCarthy
So now you're on the run,' Warrick said wistfully. 'Travelling the Dark Highway, a lone wolf. With your friend, who is another wolf. Two lone wolves. Two wolves, really. Not really alone. Two wolves in a car. Travelling. One of them naked and bloody. The other with her ass hanging out.
Derek Landy
A table for TONIGHT should certainly have been booked years before-perhaps, it was implied, by Richard's parents. A table for TONIGHT was impossible: if the pope, the prime minister, and the president of France arrived this evening without a confirmed reservation, even they would be turned out into the street with a continental jeer.
Neil Gaiman
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
The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.
Stephen King
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
Ian McEwan
She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.
David Nicholls
The only way to ensure democracy functions correctly is to question its governance constantly. Fail to do so and you may awake to find yourself living in a police state.
Stewart Stafford
Did you know that the origin of the word gossip in English is "god-sibling"? It's the talk between people who are godparents to the same child, people who have a legitimate loving interest in the person they talk about. It's talk that weaves a net of support and connection beneath the people you want to protect.
Beth Gutcheon
Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.
Stephen King
What about you?" he asked, his words not much more than a mumble. "Regrets?""Many," Skuduggery said.Tesseract's breath rattled in his chest. "That's the goo thing about living. You get to make up for past mistakes.""Or make brand-new ones.
Derek Landy
The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
Ray Bradbury
So you believe in fate,” I say.Dr. Mann pauses thoughtfully before answering. “I believe each of us was uniquely created for a specific purpose designed by the Creator, and that, because of that, there are certain things in our lives that we are destined by Him to do. The rest, I think, is soft clay: left entirely to the defining influences of choice, chance, and circumstance. And luck! Don’t forget luck.
Lauren Miller
All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade."He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood driz-zling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he?"Speaking in the literature sense," the cop said, grinning, "this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Anne Rice than Armistead Maupin. I suggest you follow Queen Victoria's advice - close your eyes and think of strawberry shortcake.
Stephen King
JASON: 'Intended wings.' How depressing.MICHAEL: Yes. Makes them into suicides, really, the pigeons.JASON: No - no, it doesn't. It could mean the wings were 'intended' to carry them upwards, out of the darkness, but they were defective in some way, these wings, so the pigeons aren't suicidal, not at all, just badly equipped for flying. Like the rest of us.
Simon Gray
I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.
Helene Hanff
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?
Cormac McCarthy
A living poem" had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.
Nicholas Sparks
I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could not be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn’t. I didn’t care. I had enough problems of my own.
Graeme Simsion
I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.
Ernest Cline
IF WE DIE FOR THEM, I'LL KILL YOU, HARRY!
J.K. Rowling
Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
Robert Bresson
Was it enough to wear the night with me just once? I am unsatisfied.
Saundra Mitchell
Your brother was a terrible traitor, I know, but if we start killing men at weddings they’ll be even more frightened of marriage than they are presently.
George R.R. Martin
Like I'm on the verge of just blowing up. All the stress and pressure and anxiety just bubbling up.
Ned Vizzini
It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
Ray Bradbury
No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world
Tom Schulman
Who can know when his world is going to change? . . . Who would suspect that in the morning a different child would wake? . . . Perhaps I should have at least known something, but maybe not; who can sense revelation in the wind?What happened was just this: I got hooked on the story.For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next.
William Goldman
On the plane leaving Tokyo I’m sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing “Over the Rainbow” straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn’t give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don’t even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon.
Bret Easton Ellis
...I overheard Dorothy talking to Mr Montrose and she was telling Mr Montrose that she thought that I would be great in the movies if he would write me a part that only had three expressions, Joy, Sorrow, and Indigestion.
Anita Loos
There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps...
Jean-Pierre Melville
Books are really places, make no mistake about that.
Neil Gaiman