Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 32

When you've got the personality you don't need the nudity.
Mae West
Do you want a cookie?- What?- A cookie. Like an Oreo. Do you want one?- No.- How can you not want a cookie?- I just don't.- Okay, fine,let's say you did want a cookie. Let's say you were dying for a cookie, and there were cookies in the cupboard. What would you do?- I'd eat a cookie?- Exactly. That's all I'm saying.- What are you saying?- That if people want cookies, they should get a cookie. It's what people do.- Let me guess. Dad won't let you have acookie?- No. Even though I'm practically starving to death, he won't even consider it. He says I have to have a sandwich first.- And you don't think that's fair.- You just said you'd get a cookie if you wanted one. So why can't I? I'm not a little kid. I can make my own decisions.- Hmm. I can see why this bothers you somuch.- It's not fair. If he wants a cookie, he can have one. If you want a cookie,you can have one. But if I want a cookie, the rules don't count. Like yousaid, it's not fair.- So what are you going to do?- I'm going to eat a sandwich. Because I have to. Because the world isn't fairto ten-year-olds.
Nicholas Sparks
You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer!" Miss Frost said. "It's not a career choice.
John Irving
You look angry," he said."You put me on hold.""For a very good reason.""You put me," she said very, very slowly, "on hold.
Derek Landy
I am not the smartest or most talented person in the world but I succeeded because I keep going and going and going.
Sylvester Stallone
There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.
Juan Rulfo
See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!
Ben Affleck
Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.
Peter Shaffer
AK 47, is perfect copy, yes? Every detail. Like real thing. Yes. Kalashnikov. Your boy, he be happy for Uncle Sante, no?”“I’m sorry, Sante. It’s really nice of you, but I don’t want Sofus playing with guns.”Conversation between George Hanson and SanteIn The Shadow of Sadd
Steen Langstrup
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
Nick Hornby
Little tape recorders, that's what kids are, Cat thought. If you want to find out what your husband is saying behind your back, play Barbie with your daughter.
Jan Strnad
This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?
Charles Yu
Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus ... meaning that it keeps things moving but it's neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.
M.R. Carey
Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.
Ian McEwan
Ooh, you look much tastier than Crabbe and Goyle, Harry" said Hermione, before catching sight of Ron's raised eyebrows, blushing slightly and saying "oh you know what I mean - Goyle's Potion looked like bogies.
J.K. Rowling
I find it rude to laugh at a man with a sword.
Derek Landy
It's tough, man. Unless it's a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that's all the studios are even doing. They've kind of admitted they're not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you're out of the league, you're done.
Richard Linklater
Pretend that you're a clever shepherd girl, and you're just dressed up in pretty clothes, and you're trying to make everybody believe that you're a spoiled, empty-headed little princess. So no one guesses that under your clothes you're a brave shepherd girl who climbs trees and chases away wolves with your staff.
Johanna Sinisalo
We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.
Gore Vidal
You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.
Stephen King
My uncle always said that it was the sword in a man's hand that determined his worth, not the one between his legs.
George R.R. Martin
The problem with the politicians of both parties in the US is that neither of them have a real agenda except to feather their own nests. They both have their hands deep in corporate pockets. All the rest is sleight of hand and distraction to keep the public occupied with trivia, divided against each other, and thinking their vote matters.
Michael Hogan
Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.
Stephen Chbosky
All men must die. We are but death's instruments, not death himself.
George R.R. Martin
His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.
J.K. Rowling
She was one of those languid women, made of dark honey, smooth and sweet, and terribly sticky, who take control of a room with a syrupy gesture, a toss of the hair, a single slow whiplash of the eyes — and all the while remain as still as the centre of a hurricane, apparently unaware of the force of gravity by which they irresistibly attract themselves the yearnings and the souls of both men and women.
Patrick Süskind
Time is a circus always packing up and moving away.
Ben Hecht
There is power in a King's blood.
George R.R. Martin
He was a bad, bad bastard. He abused the privilege of being a cunt, as my old Da would say.’ I smiled, picturing the cozy fireside scene of young son on father’s knee being inducted into the world of abusive epithets.
Craig Russell
I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.
Mark Haddon
We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.
J.K. Rowling
She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.
Guy Gavriel Kay
The first thing they would do would be to open my mouth and extract the soggy ball of my handkerchief, and as they spread it out flat on the table beside my white remains, an orange stamp—a stamp belonging to the King—would flutter to the floor: It was like something right out of Agatha Christie.
Alan Bradley
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
Peter Stone
It must have been fifty seconds before Doc died.Long time.
William Goldman
Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.
Stephen King
The experience also illuminated another fact: regardless of how you travel, as you get deeper into your thirties you might be the only person your age out on the road at all, whether it's in the hostels with the twentysomethings, or on the fancy cruises with the sixtysomethings. In your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans, getting husbands through rehab, living for someone besides themselves. Suckers.
Kristin Newman
No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That’s why they call it rewriting.
Steven Pressfield
Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.
Tom Stoppard
Woman is like a russian roulette", i've used to say, "it doesn't matter how many you dodge away or find the ones that would steal your breath and makes you sweat, at the end of the day, the fatal one always finds you. It is simply the law of the Love Gun.
Mladen Đorđević
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Stephen King
Make no choice, and you have chosen. Failure to decide, because you lack the right, is itself a decision, First Councilor. In abstaining, you vote.
George R.R. Martin
We may not be in Manchester but we will always be united
Morris Gleitzman
Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you imagine it.
George Lucas
They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.
Ray Bradbury
It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.
Reginald Rose
I left this conversation hours ago, but somehow my mouth is still moving, words are still forming, and none have seemed to offend. Amazing, the mind. My mind, I mean. Not hers.
Peter Hedges
She was a dead girl having the worst panic attack shed ever had. Not because she was afraid of dying, but because she knew that she would never live again.
Tonya Hurley
Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end.
George R.R. Martin
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
Stephen King
You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.
Thomas Harris
Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.
Ray Bradbury
What would the world come to if people kept carrying grudges against all reason? That has been the cross of Sicily, where men are so busy with vendettas they have no time to earn bread for their families.
Mario Puzo
I tell the squad a joke: "Stop me if you're heard this. There was a Marine of nuts and bolts, half robot--weird but true--whose every move was cut from pain as though from stone. His stoney little hide had been crushed and broken. But he just laughed and said, 'I've been crushed and broken before.' And sure enough, he had the heart of a bear. His heart functioned for weeks after it had been diagnosed by doctors. His heart weighed half a pound. His heart pumped seven hundred thousand gallons of warm blood through one hundred thousand miles of veins, working hard--hard enough in twelve hours to lift one sixty-five ton boxcar one foot off the deck. He said. The world would not waste the heart of a bear, he said. On his clean blue pajamas many medals hung. He was a walking word of history, in the shop for a few repairs. He took it on the chin and was good. One night in Japan his life came out of his body--black--like a question mark. If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs perhaps you have misjudged the situation. Stop me if you've heard this...
Gustav Hasford
Did I tell you what veal practice is? Oh! Veal practice involved me lying very still on the sofa trying as hard as I could to mimic the life of a veal. While eating veal. I wish I were kidding. It. Was. Magic.
Shonda Rhimes
This was it, he knew it, was sure of it, this was the door which would take him back—
Stephen King
You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent.
Harold Pinter
We often confuse what we wish for with what is.
Neil Gaiman
Thank you...for gracing my life with your lovely presence, for adding the sweet measure of your soul to my existence.
Richard Matheson
Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker
Grant Morrison