Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 23

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.
Nick Hornby
I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.
John Patrick Shanley
If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.
Clifford Odets
Falling in love is more than infatuation. It is the need to feel whole, to feel safe, to be healed, to join together with someone, heart and soul.
Michael R. French
Earth is a homicide victim. We lose our children. There are wars. Disease. And God comes strolling by like a cosmic Billie Burke.
William Peter Blatty
One will probably have to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)
Ingmar Bergman
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
Gore Vidal
We move in and out of darkness and light all our lives. Right now I'm pleased to be in the light.
Neal Shusterman
I have faith that God will show you the answer. But you have to understand that sometimes it takes a while to be able to recognize what God wants you to do. That's how it often is. 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 went home and tried to sleep, but couldn't, so I stared up at the moon, watching how it's trailing edge faded into darkness, so close to being full, but not quite there. A pregnant moon, Grandma called it. Full almost to bursting, and ready to give birth to something unthinkable.
Neal Shusterman
Books are temporary , dicks are forever
Gillian Flynn
Power tends to connect absolute power connects absolutely.
Peter Newman
Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it’s hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don’t get off is it’s still fifty blocks from where you’re going? Well, I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it’s the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I’ve had enough, it’s my stop. I’ve had enough.
Marsha Norman
It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.
Jonathan Tropper
There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.
Neil Gaiman
When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people—relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print—create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task. “But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. “It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.“The silence of the dead says, Goodbye. “The silence of the missing says, Find me.
Dennis Lehane
We'll never be ready. So I guess that means we're as ready as we'll ever be.
Neal Shusterman
I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when I’m sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.
J.K. Rowling
I honestly see the battle between Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative as the exact same dynamic--there's a group of people in this world that don't like conflict and care about what other people are going through, and then there's this other group of people in the world who hate that. 'Suck it up, man, we're not coddling you, take care of yourself, what's your problem?' It's jocks versus geeks, and I've always referred to life as perpetual high school because it never stops.
Paul Feig
But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry (of life) will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge of the world that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Cormac McCarthy
...the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.
Richard K. Morgan
Jeese, I thought, fear choking me. I was being targeted by a ‘tangoed’ psychopath!
Adele Rose
We see what we want to see, what we expect to see, instead of what's really there. I don't think we do it on purpose, most of the time. We just get kind of stuck. We start thinking that the way things are is the way they'll always be. But that's not true. It can't be true. Because the world is never still.
Lauren Miller
You've sort of made up for it tonight,' said Harry. 'Getting the sword. Finishing off the Horcux. Saving my life.' 'That makes me sound a lot cooler than I was,' Ron mumbled.'Stuff like that always sounds cooler than it really was,' said Harry. 'I've been trying to tell you that for years.'Simultaneously they walked forwards and hugged, Harry gripping the still sopping back of Ron's jacket.
J.K. Rowling
Presidents make history. I'm just a tool of history.
Chris Weitz
That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.
Nicholas Sparks
I realize that I don’t know where to start. Not because I’m unsure of my story, but because I’m not sure why I feel compelled to tell it in the first place. What can be achieved by unearthing the past?
Nicholas Sparks
There was an agelessness about him, a stillness; on Roose Bolton's face, rage and joy looked much the same.
George R.R. Martin
It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.
Ray Bradbury
Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.
Richard Price
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
Cormac McCarthy
It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump as it does when you see a preserved arm in a laboratory vat.
Ray Bradbury
A willingness to go against the conventional wisdom was one of the side effects of looking at the world in a particular light.
Kem Nunn
I hate time. It never does what you want it to.
Nick Hornby
She had a way of moving that moved him as much as music, which was what moved him most of all. Surely the spirit animating that pearless body must be unusual too? Why would nature make a vessel like that, if not to contain something still more valuable?
J.K. Rowling
I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings.
Bret Easton Ellis
The problem isn't finding out where you are gonna go-its figuring out what you are gonna do once you get there that is! (Jamie Sullivan)
Nicholas Sparks
And he wallowed in disgust and loathing, and his hair stood on end at the delicious horror.
Patrick Süskind
You know how they say the path to hell is paved with good intentions? Well, maybe the path to heaven is paved with bad ones.
Jake Coburn
I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn't have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.
Peter S Beagle
Paths cross all the time in this world of our, sometimes in the strangest places.
Stephen King
Here she is,” her mum said, cooing at the baby, “my special girl.”“Oh, cheers,” Valkyrie said, rolling her eyes.
Derek Landy
You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you...
George R.R. Martin
Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.
Larry McMurtry
A standing prick hath no conscience. And if that standing prick is attached to Bruce Robertson then it hath less than no conscience. You can't afford a conscience in this life, that has become a luxury for the rich and a social ball and chain for the rest of us. Even if I wanted one, which I certainly do not, I wouldn't have the faintest idea as how to go about getting one.
Irvine Welsh
The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity.
Grant Morrison
The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell.
Steven Pressfield
Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.
David Nicholls
It was a cruel fate, Yet not so cruel as Mago's will be. I promise you that, by the old gods and the new, by the lamb god and the horse god and every god that lives. I swear by the Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World. Before I am done with them, Mago and Ko Jhaqo will plead for the mercy they showed Eroeh.
George R.R. Martin
There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?
Woody Allen
Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
Neil Gaiman
I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.
Mae West
Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost.
David Cronenberg
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to." #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]
Jim Jarmusch
Try to remember the moment when all the stupid innocent things you thought about life and love, all the things you thought mattered, all the things you though were true. . .try to remember when they all turned out to be lies. —Kyle
Chad Kultgen
Oh, very good,' interrupted Snape, his lip curling. 'Yes, it is easy to see that nearly six years of magical education have not been wasted on you, Potter. 'Ghosts are transparent.
J.K. Rowling
The ones who love us never really leave us, you can always find them in here.' - Sirius Black
J.K. Rowling
We could have all been killed -or worse, expelled.
J.K. Rowling
In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term grown, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our high nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
Are we all, at heart, just Internet trolls?
Sarah Lotz