Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 34

Winter is coming.
George R.R. Martin
His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere.
Stephen King
He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood.
Stephen King
During the interim, no matter how much agony the man may feel, he also experiences excitement, the excitement of learning how to cope with a closed society that reflects free society as a funhouse mirror reflects the human form: everything is there, but distorted.
Edward Bunker
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
Neil Gaiman
Dennis Thatcher husband of Margaret Thatcher when asked who wore the pants in his house said "I do and I also wash and iron them." I only like two kinds of men domestic and foreign.
Mae West
Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.
David Cronenberg
But the human mind, when it reaches the bottom of the abyss, must bounce back or disintegrate entirely.
Edward Bunker
I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.
Neil Gaiman
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.
Jim Henson
Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
Lillian Hellman
Come on!' he muttered, staring about. 'Where are you? Dad, come on--" But no one came. Harry raised his head to look at the circle of dementors across the lake. One of them was lowering its hood. It was time for the rescuer to appear--but no one was coming to help this time-- And then it hit him--he understood. He hadn't seen his father--he had seen himself--... 'It was stupid, thinking it was him,' he (Harry) muttered. 'I mean, I knew he was dead.' 'You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night.'... 'You know, Harry, in a way, you did see your father last night...You found him inside yourself.' And Dumbledore left the office, leaving Harry to his very confused thoughts.
J.K. Rowling
Without my voice and spirit I am dust. This is not what I want, but what I must.
Mike Bartlett
She must disappear for a time from the human surface,And sacrifice everything for this, To recreate herself from the depths of her world.
David Foenkinos
Having an answer is a comfort. It's when you start asking questions and those questions pull threads in the larger fabric, you're forced to wonder what you're left with. And for people of any age, it's scary to think the fabric of the universe - or the universe as you've always believed it existed - can just unwind, you know?
Robin Epstein
Naughtiness is a diamond of childhood.
Aabid Surti
If you have something hot, you keep your mouth shut, your eyes open, and your secrets buried.
Richard Castle
Of course he freaked me out. Of course it's nothing to do with me. But none of that matters. He loved me and now he doesn't. I was everything to him and now I am nothing.
Emma Forrest
Yet Conscience is a nobleman, the best in us, and a friend.
Richard Llewellyn
Snape looked horrified. 'You have kept him alive so that he can die at the right moment?''Don't look shocked, Severus. How many men and women have you watched die?''Lately, only those whom I could not save', said Snape.
J.K. Rowling
Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the other who would drag us all into the eternal light
George R.R. Martin
If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do.
Neil Gaiman
To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.
Dashiell Hammett
Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.- Don Corleone
Mario Puzo
And when I came in with tears in my eyes, you always knew whether I needed you to hold me or just let me be. I don't know how you knew, but you did, and you made it easier for me.
Nicholas Sparks
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly.
Cormac McCarthy
What do you want? What do you know about it? What are you talking about? Everything belongs to Him, just as I do. But I, I love Him. I worship Him, I serve Him. Do you think you can oppose Him, poor creatures like you? He's all-powerful. He's above all of you. Everything we have comes from Him. Everything that lives or grows comes from Him.
Felix Salten
She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of the horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well.
George R.R. Martin
Each person whoever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits.And that is, more or less, everything you need to know about Daisy. The rest is details.
Neil Gaiman
I just meant maybe you could set here and drink one of em with me.He squinted at her. You ever notice how women have trouble takin no for a answer? I think itstarts about age three.What about men?They get used to it. They better.
Cormac McCarthy
Of course I began to see Nikki, which was strange because I was staring into Danny's eyes, and Danny is a six-foot-three black man who looks nothing like my ex-wife.
Matthew Quick
Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows.” Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
Stephen King
You see, there was this man, and he was a good man; he worked hard and did everything to the best of his ability. All he desired was for the most beautiful woman in the kingdom to be his wife. Now this wasn't all bad because she actually loved him too--very much so--but this vizier, he wanted her as well and not for so noble a cause as love.""What did he want her for?"Yashar paused for a moment. "So that people could look at him and say, 'He must be a great man to have such a beautiful wife.'""Oh. I thought he wanted her for sex," said Colby, disappointed.
C. Robert Cargill
What is pain to a man? A privilege!
James Clavell
Harry flung himself out from behind the bush and pulled out his wand."EXPECTO PATRONUM!" he yelled.And out of the end of his wand burst, not a shapeless cloud of mist, but a blinding, dazzling, silver animal. He screwed up his eyes, trying to see what it was. It looked like a horse. It was galloping silently away from him, across the black surface of the lake. He saw it lower its head and charge at the swarming dementors. . . . Now it was galloping around and around the black shapes on the ground, and the dementors were falling back, scattering, retreating into the darkness. . . . They were gone. The Patronus turned. It was cantering back toward Harry across the still surface of the water. It wasn't a horse. It wasn't a unicorn, either. It was a stag. It was shining brightly as the moon above. . . it was coming back to him.
J.K. Rowling
If I were to be honest, I'm probably fifty percent bagel. Okay, fine, sixty percent.
Christy Hall
Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
William Inge
I just want you to know,' said the girl, coldly, 'that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.' And then she added, with feeling, 'Idiot.
Neil Gaiman
The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.
Stephen King
The next time you're mad at me, talk to me,' he said. 'Don't shut me out. I don't like playing games. And by the way, I had a great time, too.
Nicholas Sparks
No-one ever built a statue of a critic.
David Nicholls
People need foundation myths, some imprint of year zero, a bolt that secures the scaffolding that in turn holds fast the entire architecture of reality, of time: memory-chambers and oblivion-cellars, walls between eras, hallways that sweep us on towards the end-days and the coming whatever-it-is. We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that's discernible, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming even if it isn't really, if it's all just ink-blots.
Tom McCarthy
A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
Raymond Chandler
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you're going to die. There is always the possibility of escape. There is always somewhere else and far away, a fact I had never really appreciated until I read Gitta Sereny's profoundly unsettling Cries Unheard about child-killer Mary Bell.At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with.This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
Mark Haddon
Dragons are notable for their lust for gold, not a bad quality taken in moderation. Dragons are immune to fire, obviously. All dragons are terrifically vain, indeed as to who is more vain, a dragon or an elf, I would not want to be the one to decide. Hint: an elf. A dragon should never be engaged in conversation as they are inveterate liars and tricksters, though if you're actually talking to a dragon, you're pretty much toast anyway. Never, ever call a dragon a worm, no matter how much they're asking for it.
John Stephens
Don't talk to me.""Why not?""Because I want to fix that in my memory for ever. Draco Malfoy, the amazing bouncing ferret...
J.K. Rowling
And I must draft an advertisement for the Daily Prophet, too,' he added thoughtfully. 'We'll be needing a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.... Dear me, we do seem to run through them, don't we?
J.K. Rowling
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
Cormac McCarthy
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Tom Stoppard
The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate.
Ann Druyan
I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.
Neil Gaiman
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
Ray Bradbury
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
John Banville
Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.
Neil Gaiman
Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she's got.
Alan Bradley
Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.
Neil Gaiman
Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.
John Irving
CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, prey-stalking, lethal prowler.MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing.MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged.CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed.MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy-footed.CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher bacterium, warm-life destroying.MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life-nurturing.CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding... planet-cremating.MORPHEUS: I am the Universe -- all things encompassing, all life embr
Neil Gaiman
Play to your strengths.""I haven’t got any," said Harry, before he could stop himself."Excuse me," growled Moody, "you’ve got strengths if I say you’ve got them. Think now. What are you best at?
J.K. Rowling
Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you're not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] ... It's unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say, "I'm sorry, good buddy, you've written some great yarns in the past but this one sucks like a vacuum cleaner"?The idea has some validity, but I don't think an unbiased opinion is exactly what I'm looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than "This sucks." (Although most of us know that "I think this has a few problems" actually means "This sucks," don't we?)
Stephen King