Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 163

And when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art.
Neil Gaiman
I don't feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don't feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.
Gillian Flynn
Free folk don't follow names, or little cloth animals sewn on a tunic," the King-Beyond-the-Wall had told him. "They won't dance for coins, they don't care how your style yourself or what that chain of office means or who your grandsire was. They follow strength. They follow the man.
George R.R. Martin
Will you go back?" asked the Lord of the Gallows. "To America?""Nothing to go back for," said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie."Things wait for you there," said the old man. "But they will wait until you return.
Neil Gaiman
Paparazzi arrived for Hugh [Grant]. We had to stand under a tree and smile for them.Photographer: 'Hugh, could you look less -- um --'Hugh: 'Pained?
Emma Thompson
We'll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we'll drink your screams
Stephen King
That's ridiculous. The only point in having enemies is so you can defeat them, kill them, brush them aside.""Or give them a chance to redeem themselves.
Derek Landy
What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.
Stephen King
Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.
Stephen King
Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be."Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
Raymond Chandler
Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
Steven Pressfield
I walk. I talk. I shop. I sneeze. I'm gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones.
Joss Whedon
It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’ ‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.
Neil Gaiman
God's voice is usually nothing more than a whisper, and you have to listen very carefully to hear it. But other times, in those rarest of moments, the answer is obvious and rings as loud as a church bell.
Nicholas Sparks
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.
Neil Gaiman
Zitner said hell would freeze over before something like that happened. Harold had a brief image of Adolf Hitler and Judas Iscariot handing out ice-skates and went on heaving sandbags.
Stephen King
It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.
Tom Perrotta
From the short story (and anthology containing it) DONNY DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE :Donny acted like he didn’t hear me. “You can’t send your mom off into eternity looking like that, Artie. She wouldn’t like it.” He reached into my mother’s casket, shoved his fingers into her mouth like it was the most logical thing in the world.
“Donny, you can’t --!”
“I’m just making her look right, Artie. It’s what she would want.” He tugged hard at my mom’s lips. I knew they were cold because I had kissed them a few moments earlier, and for a moment I felt convinced my friend had completely lost his mind. But when I looked inside Mom’s casket I knew Donny had done something only a best friend would think to do. My mother was smiling again. And she looked just the way I remembered her, the way I would always want to remember her. I got so choked up I couldn’t talk for a few minutes. 
Finally I managed, “My mother always told me you could make her smile.
Kenneth C. Goldman
But then, he thought, most politicians are small and shabby, the sort of people who have been bullied at school.That's why they become politicians.
Anthony Horowitz
Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.
Christopher Bram
Hermione: You! You foul, loathsome, evil little cocroach!Ron: Hermione, no! He's no worth it.
J.K. Rowling
Some time later, I sat in the wine cellar, staring at the walls while cradling a wineskin in my lap like a child, murmuring over and over as if lulling the child to sleep, 'I am shat upon. I am shat upon'.
Peter David
Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.
Tom Stoppard
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.
J.K. Rowling
Yes, but the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters,' said Sirius with a wry smile.
J.K. Rowling
How are we going to get out of here?""Oh, escape is easy once you have the right
Derek Landy
Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I'm considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, "Who knows why the fuck anything happens?
Ben Aaronovitch
...the total number of galaxies in the universe seems to be in the region of ten billion, and that each of them has about a hundred billion stars the size of the sun. These numbers are so absurd that I strangely find myself in a good mood. It's all so immense. I think Paul feels a bit like this as well. There is so little I can do to make a difference. It is liberating.
Erlend Loe
He'd once known a man who said that life hinged on the moment, that everything changed in the blink of an eye. Tesseract knew the truth of that as well as anybody. It was in those moments that he struck, after all, snatching people's lives away. He'd always known that it was only a matter of time before one of those moment's worked against him.
Derek Landy
Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.
Richard Russo
Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.
Neil Gaiman
Cada suspiro es como un sorbo de vida del que uno se deshace.
Juan Rulfo
HARRINGTON: And God hears your prayer, doesn't he? We hear Joy's getting better....LEWIS: That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.
William Nicholson
bullshit french post-war rationalizing
Woody Allen
To go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!
Peter Shaffer
Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?
Neil Gaiman
It is hard to die unmourned.
George R.R. Martin
They say you fly when you die.Basically, when you die, your spirit leaves your body. Actually, at first you can see all your life, like, reflected in a magic mirror. Then you start floating like a ghost. You can see anything happening around you, you can hear everything, but you can’t communicate with the world of the living.Then you see these lights, all these different lights, of all different colors. These lights are the doors that pull you into other planes of existence, but most people actually like this world so much that they don’t want to be taken away… So the whole thing turns into a bad trip and the only way out is to get reincarnated.It’s funny you know, DMT only lasts for six minutes but it really seems like eternity. It’s the same chemical that your brain receives when you die. It’s a little bit like, dying would be the ultimate trip.
Gaspar Noé
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.
Ray Bradbury
Dragons were a problem sometimes, but they only came on Tuesdays, so you could work around them.
Mike Carey
You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.
David Mamet
and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.
Stephen King
It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
Stephen King
Every single iceberg filled me with feelings of sadness and wonder. Not thoughts of sadness and wonder, mind you, because thoughts require a thinker, and my head was a balloon, incapable of thoughts. I didn't think about Dad, I didn't think about you, and, the big one, I didn't think about myself. The effect was like heroin (I think), and I wanted to stretch it out as long as possible.Even the simplest human interaction would send me crashing back to earthly thoughts. So I was the first one out in the morning, and the last one back. I only went kayaking, never stepped foot on the White Continent proper. I kept my head down, stayed in my room, and slept, but, mainly, I was. No racing heart, no flying thoughts.
Maria Semple
...talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.
Patrick Süskind
Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.
M.R. Carey
A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man's life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose. (Maester Aemon)
George R.R. Martin
If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can.
Neil Gaiman
Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.
Mark Haddon
Have you ever seen anything quite as pathetic?" said Malfoy. "And he’s supposed to be our teacher!"Harry and Ron both made furious moves toward Malfoy, but Hermione got there first - SMACK!She had slapped Malfoy across the face with all the strength she could muster. Malfoy staggered. Harry, Ron, Crabbe, and Goyle stood flabbergasted as Hermione raised her hand
J.K. Rowling
Yer a wizard, Harry!
J.K. Rowling
I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.
John Guare
Is it better to have bronze than copper and tin separately? Is this the marker of some historic advance?
Claudia Piñeiro
If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered.
Stephen King
There are always possibilities.
Jack B. Sowards
Like a needle jabbed into your arm, reality stings you, hurting you more than your skin and flesh. You realize that you're nobody. The electricity's gone out, the darkness is your sudden enemy...you have to protect yourself from the dark. Otherwise the world goes out, along with the artificial lights from the power plant. The night once again disintegrates into atoms, changes from cultivated to wild, fitting itself afterward into its original black hues, its cat skin.
Georgi Tenev
Perhaps that's the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else's happiness?
Patrick McGrath
It would look pretty messed up to be a social worker and have dried kid blood as a permanent stain in your vehicle.
Holly Goldberg Sloan
By and large, the mission of any ghost is to offer humility. They point out what's important by mocking what is not.(Joshua Malina, Sports Night)
Aaron Sorkin
Soon, they actually began to titter on their toes as they glared at me, looking more like an army of angry wasps than ever before. All they needed now were matching yellow and black jumpers and pretend stingers!
Adele Rose