Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 4

Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.
Max Brooks
Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn't say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognized Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.
Anthony Horowitz
It doesn't matter to me. We're still cousins in our own way. Blood's just something old people talk about to make you feel bad.
Rita Mae Brown
We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.
Neil Gaiman
People didn't call blacks names anymore, at least not to their faces. Italians weren't wops or dagos, and there were no more kikes, Japs, chinks, or spics in polite conversation. Everybody had a group to protest and stick up for them. But women were still being called names by men. Why? Where was our group? It's not fair.
Fannie Flagg
I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life.
Neil Gaiman
That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's does it?
John Osborne
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
Mark Haddon
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
Cormac McCarthy
You know, sex at seventy-six is getting very dangerous for my health ... since I live at seventy-nine!
Kensington Gore
But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings.
Nick Hornby
NEVER STOP DREAMING. As DREAMS have the special powers to come true one day!
Shaiju Mathew
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.You must remember this.
Neil Gaiman
The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)
David Levien
One person on their own may be able to save the world. But a team of friends, all working together, have a much greater chance of succeeding…providing that no-one succumbs to evil.’ Adele Rose, Awakening.
Adele Rose
To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike.
Joe Abercrombie
The best way to hold a man is in your arms.
Mae West
From the floor, I see the tops of the Philadelphia skyline out of her window. Staring at it, I realize that the night sky isn't really black, which is the way I've always thought of it. It's actually a dark shade of blue, the darkest possible.
Siobhan Vivian
That's chess!" snapped Ron. "You've got to make some sacrifices!
J.K. Rowling
The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
Stephen King
They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books.
Neil Gaiman
Miles smiled. "Can you keep a secret?"Bea snorted. "Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?""No," Miles conceded."Well, then," she said, as if that settled the matter.
Richard Russo
I am your Prince and you will marry me," Humperdinck said.Buttercup whispered, "I am your servant and I refuse.""I am you Prince and you cannot refuse.""I am your loyal servant and I just did.""Refusal means death.""Kill me then.
William Goldman
We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.
J.K. Rowling
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.
Christopher Bram
And he said that wasn’t brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung,’ said Coraline to the cat. ‘It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’"‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave
Neil Gaiman
Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought.
Stephen King
This is Denmark. We are Danes. We keep our distance. We do not pick a seat close to strangers if other seats are available. We do not talk to strangers in the trains.”William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
Would you like a cough drop Dolores?
J.K. Rowling
Who says life is fair, where is that written?
William Goldman
It made me very sad, that question. Sad and defeated. Because I knew she knew why I was thinking about that woman—I was thinking about my own tendencies toward aloneness and I thought I could end up like that woman, with a bird perhaps, or a dog—probably a dog, I know birds are supposed to make good pets but I think there’s something creepy about them—but alone with a life that didn’t touch or overlap with anyone else’s, a sort of hermetically sealed life.
Peter Cameron
A worshipping Church or a prayer group is a magnet that draws the Lord and His people to connect with each other!
Gangai Victor
A man who lies about beer makes enemies
Stephen King
Storyboarded by the West Coast’s finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes—God.
Michael Marshall Smith
Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.
David Nicholls
Facebook should start publishing breakup stories. 'So and so and so and so are no longer in a relationship.' With a tombstone next to it.
Judy Balan
True love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops.
William Goldman
He was especially excited about Aguirre, the Wrath of God. "Look at this crazy dude," he yelled, point at Klaus Kinski, who on the cover is wearing a Viking helmet and looks like a psychopath. So--with Dad's permission--we put the film in and watched it. This would turn out to be the single most important thing ever to happen in our lives.
Jesse Andrews
The universe rewards action.
Sheridan Jobbins
Pater noster Our Father who art in heaven Stay there And we'll stay here on earth Which is sometimes so pretty With its mysteries of New York And its mysteries of Paris At least as good as that of the Trinity With its little canal at Ourcq Its great wall of China Its river at Morlaix Its candy canes With its Pacific Ocean And its two basins in the Tuileries With its good children and bad people With all the wonders of the world Which are here Simply on the earth Offered to everyone Strewn about Wondering at the wonder of themselves And daring not avow it As a naked pretty girl dares not show herself With the world's outrageous misfortunes Which are legion With legionaries With torturers With the masters of this world The masters with their priests their traitors and their troops With the seasons With the years With the pretty girls and with the old bastards With the straw of misery rotting in the steel of cannons.
Jacques Prévert
He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.
Ben Aaronovitch
Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars.But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all.To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want toget ahead.The truth is, you do
Brian Koppelman
Either I've always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don't know what it means.
Ian McEwan
What I've found about it is that there are some folks you can talk to until you're blue in the face--they're never going to get it and they're never going to change. But every once in a while, you'll run into someone who is eager to listen, eager to learn, and willing to try new things. Those are the people we need to reach. We have a responsibility as parents, older people, teachers, people in the neighborhood to recognize that.
Tyler Perry
The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.
Neil Gaiman
I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.
Stephen King
Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.
William Goldman
Good writing is rhythm.
William Peter Blatty
Henry Jones: I didn't know you could fly a plane!Indiana Jones: Fly -- yes, land -- no.
Rob MacGregor
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particuarly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.
Neil Gaiman
We’re here to change the world, not participate in its tedium.
Chuck Wendig
Our stories are what we have,” Our Good Mother says. “Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?
Julianna Baggott
So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.
Nick Hornby
Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.
Ray Bradbury
Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.
Stephen King
I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.
Neil Gaiman
‎And when this intoxication has worn away... when every desire is fulfilled and every language learned- when there are no more distant cities to explore; no classics to be studied; not another coin to be stuffed in to one's coffers- what then? One can have all the comforts of the world, but what use are they if there is no comfort in them?
Seth Grahame-Smith
We can't choose our fate, but we can choose others. Be careful in knowing that.
J.K. Rowling
No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow," said Gidas moodily. "He has her body for a time if he's lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul." Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be.
Guy Gavriel Kay
I blame Chennai. Pointless neighbourhood gossip travels faster than tsunami alerts around here. I know that aunties are a universal problem but this city is particularly aunty dominated. And by that, I mean, even many of our twenty-somethings act like aunties. Forgive the rant. Maybe I've lived here too long (and have therefore outgrown it) but I sincerely believe that Chennai has no business being called a metro. I mean, if a thirty-year-old single woman living alone while her parents are in the same city, is still such hot news, then maybe we need to graciously give up our metro status to someone more deserving. And since we have no qualms about lagging so far behind the times, maybe we should call ourselves retro.
Judy Balan