Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 157

I’m smart in some ways- pretty good vocabulary, solid at math – but I am definitely the stupidest smart person there is… I was going to be the worst friend in the history of dying girls… Because I don’t really have a moral compass and I need to rely on (Earl) for guidance, or else I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something. How fucked up is that.
Jesse Andrews
China is the same age as I am, and even I have to admit that she wears it better!" He laughed, then stopped and peered at her. "Because I'm a skeleton" he explained.
Derek Landy
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
John Banville
She could never take an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. The weak and flaccid parity would make her nearly puke. She wants an eye for a tooth, and a life for an eye.
Helen Zahavi
Getting up early and feeling awake was the one skill he had never truly perfected - he got up, of course, but it never felt natural.
Larry McMurtry
Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This gawky wormbent tabernacle.
Cormac McCarthy
If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.
Paul Auster
Granamyr doesn't fight humans, Granamyr wins.
Larry DiTillio
Suffering is sometimes cleansing,” said the man. His clothes were casual, but expensive. “It can purify."“It can also fuck you up,” said Shadow.
Neil Gaiman
After all, what more does a true genius want? The mind itself is the palace where all the real treasures, the works of art, the indulgences exist.
Alex Scarrow
And it's good-bye, good-bye, good-bye. Good-bye, my friends, I love you; good-bye, I'm sorry I didn't know you better; good-bye, I'm sorry you'll die soon, too; good-bye, maybe there's hope for you; good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
Chris Weitz
It's like this with us baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts....nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.
Raymond Chandler
Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.
Ben H. Winters
I often wondered how it would be to tramp off into the mountains and keep going until I was exhausted, then simply sink into the snow and fall asleep. Then the wolves could have me.To want to die in the forest and be eaten by wolves: another marker of incipient madness.
Patrick McGrath
It's hard to know where to start. Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts. All you can ever really know is that it's wrapped around you, sometimes a little tighter than you'd like.But clearly there have been some mistakes. Bad ones. You can tell that just by looking at him.
Jonathan Tropper
Isn't bravery always sort of beautiful?
Stephen King
But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.
Dennis Lehane
Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox from birth or dressing up a dog to look like a fox. Or hiring David Attenbrorough, who probably knows a few foxes well enough to ask a favour.
Emma Thompson
If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won’t. You’ll already have made that art, and when they’re talking about the last thing you did, you should already be making the next thing.If bad reviews (of whatever kind) upset you, just don’t read them. It’s not like you’ve signed an agreement with the person buying the book to exchange your book for their opinion.Do whatever you have to do to keep making art. I know people who love bad reviews, because it means they’ve made something happen and made people talk; I know people who have never read any of their reviews. It’s their call. You get on with making art.
Neil Gaiman
She already felt dead in everything but name. What remained to be taken from her? She longed to be enfolded, welcomed, into the earth - to breathe no more, love no more, hurt no more
Alan Brennert
So easy now that Elder Sister has explained to her what all young girls in houses are taught—that with care and meticulous acting and tears of pretended pain and fear, and the final modest telltale stains cautiously placed, a girl can, if necessary, be virgin ten times for ten different men.
James Clavell
Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.
Stephen King
Doyle: "What is it now, then?"Cordelia: "Isn't java supposed to be a coffee?"Doyle: "Ready to abandon the the Web project?"Cordelia: "No way. We have a chance here to make contact with the millions of people out there who are glued to their computers."Doyle: "All those millions, shunning human contact. I'll never understand it. Call me old-fashioned, if you like, but I want to interface with a face, not a hunk of plastic and glass."Cordelia: "Climb out of the Dark Ages, Munchkin man."Doyle: "It's leprechaun, and either way, I don't appreciate the insult.
John Passarella
When Roseanne read the first script of mine that got into her hands without being edited by someone else she said, 'How can you write a middle-aged woman this well?' I said, 'If you met my mom you wouldn't ask'.
Joss Whedon
Never forget that God is your friend. And like all friends, He longs to hear what's been happening in your life. Good or bad, whether it's been full of sorrow or anger, or even when you're questioning why terrible things have to happen.
Nicholas Sparks
I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I simply have to close my eyes, and wait until tomorrow in order to find out.
Charles Yu
You can't hide the thunderbolt. When it hits you, everybody can see it. Christ, man, don't be ashamed of it, some men pray for the thunderbolt. You're a very lucky fellow. - Calo
Mario Puzo
Live each day as if it were your last, for one day, you're sure to be right.
Kenneth G. Ross
In the midst of aches in the joints, anxiety over the payment of bills, concern for the safety of those you love, envy of the rich, fear of robbers, dog-weariness at the end of a long day, and the unacceptable slipping away of youth, there does occasionally appear, like a ray of light piercing the clouds, a moment of joy. Perhaps you have entered the house and sat down before removing your boots. A friend has pressed a drink into your hands, and is telling you the latest news. You see from his face that he's glad you've come in; and you are glad too. Glad to be sitting down, glad of the warming glow of the dirnk, glad of your friend's furrowed brow and eager speech. For this moment, nothing more is required. It is in its way unimprovable. This is what I mean by the Great Enough.
William Nicholson
Don’t worry, my friend. I won’t let you die.” I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.
David Benioff
You accused me of murder. Do you make a habit of bringing schoolgirls into an interview room with murder suspects?' He waved his hand. 'Oh, I was only joking about that. I don't really think you murdered someone. Unless you did, in which case I reserve the right to say I knew it all along.
Derek Landy
I don’t like being left for long struggling with my dangerous self.
Hanif Kureishi
If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can't go back.
David Mamet
After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie's flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, and suddenly life became very good indeed.
Mark Haddon
Believing the lie that time will heal all wounds is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.
Jonathan Nolan
I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.
Neil Gaiman
Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.
Tony Kushner
Most prayers are not really questions...and if we listen very closely, a prayer is often its own answer. ...We pray because we are here - not to change the world, but to change ourselves. Because it is when we change ourselves...that the world is changed.
Douglas Wood
Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: Frequently there must be a beverage.
Woody Allen
It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.
Christopher Bram
The nobility of England would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount. But you'll labor like scholars over a bulldog's pedigree.
Robert Bolt
Close your eyes and click your heals three times...because there's no place like Dome.
Stephen King
Do you always travel with such cumbersome books?''I don't trust anyone who wouldn't.
Doug Dorst
My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.
Emma Thompson
Love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops.
William Goldman
Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.
Neil Gaiman
Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
Neil Gaiman
All that work: his generous patronage of the arts, the vast sums of money he had donated to worthy causes, setting up charitable organizations . . . for what? In the end, none of those good works had redeemed him in the eyes of others. People think that men like me give money away to buy forgiveness for a sin or out of vanity, when it's the winner's pathetic tribute to the loser. Look at me, we seem to be begging, I need you too. I need you to accept me, to admire me, to love me.
Carmen Posadas
Kissing Hugh was lovely. Glad I invented it. Can't rely on Austen for a snog, that's for sure.
Emma Thompson
If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?
Joe Abercrombie
While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue.
Leslie Charteris
Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.
Neil Gaiman
Blood always excites me.
Jonathan Latimer
I've never thought there was anything I could hope to get by praying for it.
Julianna Baggott
You know your Bible too well and life too little.
Richard Llewellyn
Sing, then. Sing, indeed, with shoulders back, and head up so that song might go to the roof and beyond to the sky. Mass on mass of tone, with a hard edge, and rich with quality, every single note a carpet of colour woven from basso profundo, and basso, and baritone, and alto, and tenor, and soprano, and also mezzo, and contralto, singing and singing, until life and all things living are become a song.O, Voice of Man, organ of most lovely might.
Richard Llewellyn
If you’ve ever studied mortal age cartoons, you’ll remember this one. A coyote was always plotting the demise of a smirking long-necked bird. The coyote never succeeded; instead, his plans always backfired. He would blow up, or get shot, or splat from a ridiculous height.And it was funny.Because no matter how deadly his failure, he was always back in the next scene, as if there were a revival center just beyond the edge of the animation cell.I’ve seen human foibles that have resulted in temporary maiming or momentary loss of life. People stumble into manholes, are hit by falling objects, trip into the paths of speeding vehicles.And when it happens, people laugh, because no matter how gruesome the event, that person, just like the coyote, will be back in a day or two, as good as new, and no worse—or wiser—for the wear.Immortality has turned us all into cartoons.
Neal Shusterman
Today a great shot for freedom was heard. I think it stands a chance of being heard forever. It marls a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The beginning of the return to a statues of dignity we have not known for two thousand years. Yes, today was the first step back. My battle is done. Now I turn the command over to the soldiers.
Leon Uris
Words are wind.
George R.R. Martin
She had not been conferred with a practical sense of how one went about this strange and all inverted business of being a girl, where seemingly natural stuff like going on about all the great things you just learned about Siberian tigers on National Geographic was suddenly weird, but totally weird stuff in and of itself like drawing around your eyeball with a pencil became normal, and it impressed to no end that it was a product of meticulous effort that made the twins seem so perfectly and effortlessly feminine.
Brian McGreevy