Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 21

Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?- How else? Though not till I'm done reading.

The dust was antique spice, burnt maple leaves, a prickling blue that teemed and sifted to earth. Swarming its own shadows, the dust filtered over the tents.

Dalek: I will talk to the Doctor.The Doctor: Oh will you? That's nice. Hello!Dalek: The Dalek strategem nears completion. The fleet is almost ready. You will not intervene.The Doctor: Oh really? Why's that, then?Dalek: We have your associate. You will obey or she will be exterminated. The Doctor: No.Dalek: Explain yourself.The Doctor: I said, "No."Dalek: What is the meaning of this negative?The Doctor: It means, "No."Dalek: But she will be destroyed!The Doctor: No! 'Cause this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna rescue her. I'm gonna save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet, and then I'm gonna save the Earth. And then—just to finish off—I'm gonna wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!Dalek: But you have no weapons, no defenses, no plan.The Doctor: Yeah! And doesn't that scare you to death? Rose?Rose: Yes, Doctor?The Doctor: I'm coming to get you.

Fred, George, Harry, and Ron were the only ones who knew that the angel on top of the tree was actually a garden gnome that had bitten Fred on the ankle as he pulled up carrots for Christmas dinner. Stupefied, painted gold, stuffed into a miniature tutu and with small wings glued to its back, it glowered down at them all, the ugliest angel Harry had ever seen, with a large bald head like a potato and rather hairy feet.

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

In the end you should always do the right thing even if it's hard.

He wanted to be stopped, to be dragged back, to be sent back home... But he was home. Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here...

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

Hagrid: Harry -- yer a wizard.Harry: I'm a what?

She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not.

Like the fact that the person Sirius cared for the most about in the world was you," said Dumbledore quietly.

Why would anyone bother making door-keys shrink?’ said George.‘Just Muggle-baiting,’ sighed Mr Weasley. ‘Sell them a key that keeps shrinking to nothing so they can never find it when they need it ... Of course, it’s very hard to convict anyone because no Muggle would admit their key keeps shrinking – they’ll insist they just keep losing it. Bless them, they’ll go to any lengths to ignore magic, even if it’s staring them in the face ...

It wasn't my choice to write this story...it was my responsibility.

Better to be dirty than dead.

She resented being told constantly that she was stupid, when she knew she wasn't.

I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

Perfection does not take into account the viewer.' Pheidias had once said to me. 'It exists on it own, independent of and unconcerned with opinions or utility.

You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy's leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there's a difference, like the banker's just doing his job but the loan shark's a criminal. I like the loan shark better because he doesn't pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be where I am sitting right now. I'm not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men's club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid's grades. Die at my desk, and they'll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt's hit the coffin.

As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it's not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That's the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered.

The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others.

You can’t save everyone. It’s not an option.

I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all mean are created free and equal.

Why spiders? Why couldn't it be 'follow the butterflies'?

He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think that when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor.Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

We try so hard to put our mark on things, we like to tell ourselves that what we do has import or will last. But the truth is, we're all just passing through. So little survives us. And when we're gone, it's simply the memory of others that keeps our time here alive. And when they're gone... That's why - when I go - I'm asking that my dust gets tossed on the water. Because ends up floating away.

A man that sleeps all night wastes too much of life.

Perhaps we all have a face behind a face…Good and the bad, happy and sad, sane and insane. We all have an angel and the stranger and we all have the choice!

it was like staring at a whitewashed wall, but without all the emotion

Your hair is winter fire,January embers.My heart burns there, too.-Stephen King, IT

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.

Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.

What? Did we end up hating each other? Did we end up the way we thought we always knew would? Did I end up wearing khakis because of that fucking ad?

To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence.

I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified...all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain.

We will do anything to get away from our own pain. We will change our lives, rip people out, swallow a bottle of life-ending pills. When we hurt more than we can bear, when our lives get that dark, it's shocking what we will do to protect ourselves.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives

Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.

It's always me, isn't it? I'm not really a very nice person, but for some reason it's always me that they come to with their problems.

I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.

Everything since the beginning of time was working together to make my happiness possible: and then you. You walked into the audiovisual lab in your flannel shirt...and you fucked it up! You fucked everything up! Do you understand that? Because of you, the entire universe is ruined...forever!"--Kari, The Pavilion

Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.

I think there are lots of ways of leading very good lives and growing spiritually. This process of growth goes on whether we believe it or not.

There's nothing man can imagine that nature hasn't already created a zillion times better.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It's pain, It's pleasure, Leave no path untaken.

Then you have to be nothing. Want nothing. You can't have them-Kat or Annabel-if you need them. You're not a husband. You're not a father. You're a man with a task. Understand?

Business is a game, played for fantastic stakes, and you're in competition with experts. If you want to win, you have to learn to be a master of the game.

There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second.

Or he was simply pretending—like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.

One of the tribes of Lisser, Kisera, has a saying. "Tra ulea keyē milyenura keyē gryētu - you only live on through that which you leave." You have to leave something for others to remember.' She gazed at his solemn face, pulling the cord of her cloak open, grasping half the heavy material and launching it over his shoulders. He pulled it further until in encompassed them both. Then she did something both of them were surprised at - she slid her hand into his. ‘And you will.

Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic.

It’s tough, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to do the seemingly impossible.

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

Just because you’re allowed to use magic now you don’t have to whip your wands out for every tiny little thing!

That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.