Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 26

When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that — then any time at all will be the right time for you.
Peter S Beagle
He crouched at the care window and looked in. "What a lovely family you have. What a charming family. They're all lovely. Except for that one." His finger jabbed the glass. "That one's a bit ugly."The American stepped towards him. "What? What did you say?""Oh, don't worry. I'm sure his personality makes up for his face.
Derek Landy
Nursing homes and rest homes are all the rage round here. Most of us will be in them before very long. Do you fancy that? Are you looking forward to it? No, neither am I. But I'm doing something about that. Just whisky and cigarettes, so far, mostly.
Andrew Davies
Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.
Stephen King
Picture the person who intimidates you most. Now picture them crouched like a dog, pooping on the sidewalk, looking up at you, all vulnerable. We all poop. Maybe not on the sidewalk, but nobody is better than you and don't let them think they are for a minute.
Caprice Crane
I gave Henry a supscription [sic] to the Book of the Month club that tells you the book you have to read every month to make your individuality stand out. And it really is remarkable, because it makes over 50,000 people read the same book every month.
Anita Loos
You Hang on to your pain like it means something; like it's worth something. Well, let me tell you, it's not worth shit, so let it go. Infinite Possibilities and all you can do is whine.""Well, what am I supposed to do?""What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard; You're alive!
Nancy Oliver
And then like a song we'd forgotten was even on the mix, you stepped into the house and my whole life.
Daniel Handler
The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. The the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dirt dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air.It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.
Larry McMurtry
Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?
Peter S Beagle
When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe's answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn't a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house not a magnificent home.
Dennis Lehane
They thought more before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, 'Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.' And when I tried to laugh it off and said, well, I didn't like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth touched Rand's arm: 'Because of the divorce. All those comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those are just bad memories for Nick.' It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don't like cherries.
Gillian Flynn
Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...
Ray Bradbury
Eve still marveled on a daily basis at the speed with which her own life had changed. A year ago, she'd been lost and flailing, and now she was found. She wanted to call it a miracle, but it was simpler than that, and a lot more ordinary; she'd met a kind and decent man who loved her.
Tom Perrotta
The part that needs healing is our personal life. Personal life has nothing to do with work. Besides, what better way of healing than to find our center of self-sovereignty? Isn't that the whole point of healing?
Steven Pressfield
When you're in love, there's nothing that can embarrass or surprise you.
Michael R. French
The hollowness was in his arms and the world was snowing.
William Goldman
More bloodshed followed, as brother fought brother and religion battled religion in the age-old nonsense of settling whose method of worship was the holiest to our Creator, who, for all our murderous efforts, most likely despises the lot of us.
Steve Alten
We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.
Roger Ebert
Q: The Continuum didn't think you had it in you, Jean-Luc. But I knew you did...We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.Picard: When I realized the paradox.Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.
Brannon Braga
Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.
Dennis Lehane
I suppose [my life] has most resembled a blue chip stock: fairly stable, more ups than downs, and gradually trending upward over time. A good buy, a lucky buy, and I've learned that not everyone can say that about his life.
Nicholas Sparks
I can't tell you how may beautiful women have broken up with me because they were bored. I can't tell you because it never happened. They all adored me." "It was your humility, wasn't it?
Derek Landy
The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter... or at least, most minds are...
J.K. Rowling
Actions always have consequences!
Joel Coen
Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
Robert McKee
A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely
Christopher J. Nolan
That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.
Neil Gaiman
He who hesitates is last.
Mae West
The beauty and music...It is a call...And some are not strong.
Richard Llewellyn
Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: The realm. Do you know what the realm is? It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over, until we forget that it's a lie.Lord Varys: But what do we have left, once we abandon the lie? Chaos? A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.
George R.R. Martin
Violence is not the answer, it doesn’t work any more. We are at the end of the worst century in which the greatest atrocities in the history of the world have occurred... The nature of human beings must change. We must cultivate love and compassion.
Martin Scorsese
No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.
Tom Stoppard
When you know my love, my love will warm you.
Ruby Dee
It all floats down here!
Stephen King
Great readers (are) those who know early that there is never going to be time to read all there is to read, but do their darnedest anyway.
Larry McMurtry
I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
Tom Stoppard
Being in love, I find myself smiling for no reason at all...
Nicholas Sparks
I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.
George R.R. Martin
I think of birth as the search for a larger apartment.
Rita Mae Brown
We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little more open and they are always more on the horizon. But you can't face up to the that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those you instinctively know are liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough you'll attain the godlike status we accord those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately. But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn't value it, you'd realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don't really want and keep from us what we really do need. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're getting in touch with our condition at last. It's horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone.
Irvine Welsh
Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.
Nathanael West
If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the reading of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
Bret Easton Ellis
So the gods must mean something else,” said Jix.“God, not gods!” insisted Johnnie.Nick threw up his hands. “God, gods, or whatever,” said Nick. “Right now, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Jesus, or Kukulcan, or a dancing bear at the end of the tunnel. What matters is that we have a clue, and we have to figure it out.”“Why?” Johnnie asked again. “Why does God – excuse me, I mean ‘the Light of Universal Whatever’- why does it just give us a freakin’ impossible clue? Why can’t it just tell us what we’re supposed to do?”“Because,” said Mikey. “the Dancing Bear wants us to suffer.
Neal Shusterman
What the hell makes you smart?" I asked."I wouldn't go for coffee with you.""Listen - I wouldn't ask you.""That," she replied, "is what makes you stupid.
Erich Segal
In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again.
J.K. Rowling
There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.
Neil Gaiman
There is no shame in loving.
George R.R. Martin
It's death and destruction I want to bring down upon House Lannister, not scorn. Jon said.
George R.R. Martin
It is the most fun I’m ever going to have. I love to write. I love it. I mean, there’s nothing in the world I like better, and that includes sex, probably because I’m so very bad at it. It’s the greatest peace when I’m in a scene, and it’s just me and the character, that’s it, that’s where I want to live my life.
Joss Whedon
If the Cross is God’s masterpiece of His love, then the Eucharist is the centerpiece of our worship.
Gangai Victor
Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will be the greater.
Tom Stoppard
You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry.
Stephen King
Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.
Peter S Beagle
It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.
Nathanael West
I been talkin' with my buddy, and he thinks I'm virgin enough fer the two of us.
William Inge
Katie shook her head in dismay. “I thought being poor was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.”“No, Katie,” the countess said in a clear voice. “The worst thing is to be in love with one man and have to marry another.”Katie O'Reilly to the Countess of Marbury in "Titanic Rhapsody
Jina Bacarr
What up you guys, I'm back!
Jackson Lanzing
When a dog goes bad, the fault lies with his master.
George R.R. Martin
Mr. Morrow, IOI owns this network..." "Of course they do!" Morrow shouted gleefully. 'The own practically everything! Including you, pretty boy! I mean did they tattoo a UPC code on your ass when they hired you to sit there and spout their corporate propaganda?
Ernest Cline