Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 51

Watching them, Harmony felt too shaken to take a step. Eddie and Sheba were young; but she herself had become old. Even if she wasn’t particularly old if you just counted years, the fact was years were no way to count. Happenings were the way to count, the big happening that separated her from youth or even middle age was the death of her daughter, Pepper. That death made her realize that life, once you got around to producing children, was no longer about being pretty or having boyfriends or making money – it was about protecting children; getting them raised to the point where they could try life as adults. It didn’t have to be just children that come out of your body, either. It could be anyone young who needed something you had to give. Some grown men were children; some grown women, too. Harmony knew that she had spent a good part of her life, taking care of just such men. But now that she felt old she didn’t think she wanted to spend much more of her energy protecting men who had had a good chance to grow up, but had blown it. If she never had another boyfriend – something she had been worrying about, on the plane – it might be a little dull in some areas, like sexual areas, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. What would be the end of the world would be to let some little girl like Sheba get in the car with a bad man who would make a U-turn across the street and kill her right there in front of the pay phones, where pimps and crack dealers were making their calls.
Larry McMurtry
Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don't know what the hell they're doing.
Greg Sisco
Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows . It's a very mean and nasty place, and I don't care how tough you are , it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that.
Sylvester Stallone
You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit.
Kiran Nagarkar
The fireworks continued to burn and spread all over the school that afternoon. Though they caused plenty of disruption, the other teachers did not seem to mind them very much."Dear, dear," said Professor McGonagall sardonically, as one of the dragons soared around her classroom, emitting loud bangs and exhaling flame. "Miss Brown, would you mind running along to the headmistress and informing her that we have an escaped firework in our classroom?""Thank you so much, Professor!" said Professor Flitwick in his squeaky little voice. "I could have got rid of the sparklers myself, of course, but I wasn't sure whether I had the authority..."Beaming, he closed the classroom door in Umbridge's snarling face.
J.K. Rowling
How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all?Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say, or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.
Michael Marshall Smith
They got the absolute freedom to choose what we want them to.
Don Winslow
The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.
Jean Renoir
They didn't just live with secrets. Secrecy surrounded their entire lives.
Anthony Horowitz
Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.
Christopher Bram
It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.
Neil Gaiman
The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
Gillian Flynn
He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.
Larry McMurtry
Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction?
William Boyd
There's more than enough for the many, but somehow never enough for the few
Dean Cavanagh
True love comes quietly without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells get your ears checked.
Erich Segal
There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.
Neil Gaiman
Sing to me," she said. "That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place, and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly-drown out my dreams, keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. Sing to me, my lord prince, if it please you. It may not seem a hero's task, but I would be glad of it.
Peter S Beagle
When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.
Stephen King
They were the kind of couple you rolled your eyes at. The couple you wanted to punch square in their perfect noses, but secretly hoped would become your new best friends and invite you to a private dinner party where you’d eat something made with truffle oil and share a rueful laugh about the party scene in Ibiza.
Matt K. Turner
And I was having too much fun to stop now.
Jeff Lindsay
The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it.
Ray Bradbury
As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.
Stephen King
The best steel doesn't always shine the brightest.
Joe Abercrombie
It was a stretch to imagine that Barbara Walters might want to give it all up for Ed Couch, but Evelyn tried her hardest. Of course, even though she was not religious, it was a comfort to know that the Bible backed her up in being a doormat.
Fannie Flagg
When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.
Stephen King
There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again. Whenever it rains you will think of her.
Neil Gaiman
You're my closest friend and you're thousands of miles away.
Anthony Horowitz
The Wind Will Carry UsIn my night, so brief, alasThe wind is about to meet the leaves.My night so brief is filled with devastating anguishHark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?This happiness feels foreign to me.I am accustomed to despair.Hark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?There, in the night, something is happeningThe moon is red and anxious.And, clinging to this roofThat could collapse at any moment,The clouds, like a crowd of mourning women,Await the birth of the rain.One second, and then nothing.Behind this window,The night tremblesAnd the earth stops spinning.Behind this window, a strangerWorries about me and you.You in your greenery,Lay your hands – those burning memories –On my loving hands.And entrust your lips, replete with life's warmth,To the touch of my loving lipsThe wind will carry us!The wind will carry us!
Forough Farrokhzad
My compulsive thoughts aren't even thoughts, they're absolute certainties and obeying them isn't a choice.
Paul Rudnick
This is stolen? We're in a stolen jet?""Not stolen," said Donegan Bane from the co-pilot's seat."Almost stolen," Gracious corrected."Semi-stolen," said Donegan."Quasi-stolen," said Gracious. Aurora's frown did not turn upside down. "So is it stolen or not?"Donegan and Gracious hesitated."Yes," they both said together.
Derek Landy
Just like the forces of Good and Evil, on the levels so much distant from man, logic and reason clash with each other. In that merciless, multi-millennial and primal battle, none of them stepped away for an inch. In a craddle, like no man's land, we, the young human beings, find ourselves gazing upon the "toys that glitter". I wanted to believe.
Mladen Đorđević
He spun round under her grip. She smelled so good, her touch so soft as she unhooked the buttons on his tunic. Pushing the shirt apart she frowned, her hands running over the thin scars through his tattoos. ‘And you belong to him, too.
Jessica O'Toole
Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. Writers who cannot grasp this truth, the truth of conflict, writers who have been misled by the counterfeit comforts of modern life into believing that life is easy once you know how to play the game. These writers give conflict a false inflection. The scripts they write fail for one of two reasons, either a glut of banal conflict or a lack of meaningful conflict. The former are exercises in turbo special effects written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict but because they're disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise overwrought excuses for mayhem. The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself, these writers take the pollyanna view, that life would really be nice if it weren't for conflict. What writers at these extremes fail to realize is that while the quality of conflict in life changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict is constant. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level. When, for example, we don't have to work from dawn to dark to put bread on the table, we now have time to reflect on the great conflict within our mind and heart or we may become aware of the terrible tyrannies and suffering in the world at large. As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, "The essence of reality is scarcity. There isn't enough love in the world, enough food, enough justice, enough time in life. To gain any sense of satisfaction in our life we must go in to heady conflict with the forces of scarcity. To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict at one or all three levels of our lives.
Robert McKee
More than anything, he wanted to return to the house with the same look of peace that he'd seen on Pastor Harris's face, but he trudged through the sand, he couldn't help feeling like an amateur, someone searching for God's truths like a child searching for seashells.
Nicholas Sparks
She said she didn't love him, and he said it didn't matter, and the poverty of their words brought tears to their eyes.
Françoise Sagan
It's always the lesser of two evils.''I don't see why there have to be any evils at all.'-Connor
Neal Shusterman
You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they'll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls.
George R.R. Martin
Don't be afraid of what you're creating.
Christy Hall
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
Stephen King
Give her hell from us, Peeves.
J.K. Rowling
My dear boy, your thinking has no structure, no foundation. You pick up your primary ideas from TV shows. You're like a fart in the bathtub. ['The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes']
Richard Walter
A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.
Tom Stoppard
I also remember being struck by de Sade's will, in which he asked that his ashes be scattered to the four corners of the earth in the hope that humankind would forget both his writings and his name. I'd like to be able to make that demand; commemorative ceremonies are not only false but dangerous, as are all statues of famous men. Long live forgetfulness, I've always said—the only dignity I see is in oblivion.
Luis Buñuel
...marriage is about becoming a team. You're going to spend the rest of your life learning about each other, and every now and then, things blow up. But the beauty of marriage is that if you picked the right person and you both love each other, you'll always figure out a way to get through it
Nicholas Sparks
Coraline tried drawing the mist. After ten minutes of drawing she still had a white sheet of paper with "MIST" written on it one corner in slightly wiggly letters. She grunted and passed it to her mother."Mm. Very modern, dear," said Coraline's mother.
Neil Gaiman
He had to hold his body very still, very still, like some vessel about to slosh over from too much motion. Gradually he managed to get control of his breathing. His excited heart beat more steadily; the pounding of the waves inside him subsided slowly. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusky reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened, and he entered. The next performance in the theatre of his soul was beginning.
Patrick Süskind
It really is better to be lucky than to be good.
Jeff Lindsay
Leave it man. Squirrel’s botherin nae cunt likesay! Ah hate it the wey Mark’s intae hurtin animals… it’s wrong man. Ye cannae love yirsel if ye want tae hurt things like that… ah mean… what hope is thir? The squirrel’s likes fuckin lovely. He’s daein his ain thing. He’s free. That’s mibble what Rents cannae stand. The squirrel’s free man.
Irvine Welsh
Everything is fair in love and art.
Christos Tsiolkas
When I was very young I tried selling used cars. It didn't last long. I guess that was my good luck too that I didn't show more promise at it or I might have been an automobile dealer.
King Vidor
One King means peace.
George R.R. Martin
And I'd be willing to bet that you were great at it, if only because you have to love something before you can hate it.
Nicholas Sparks
Mister Sun wondered if he really believed it was true that the heart is just a pump.
Warren Ellis
The Plutocracy’s insatiable hunger for pixelated information is enough to put a bulimic Pac-Man to shame
Dean Cavanagh
There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.
Adela Rogers St. John
Our word Tragedy comes from the Greek, tragos-ode: “The song of the goat.” Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.
Neil Gaiman
Insane people give me hope.""What!!!!" I almost dropped my beer."The insane have decided to stay on," Crumley said. "They love life so much that, rather than destroy it, they go behind a self-made wall to hide. Pretend not to hear, but the do hear. Pretend not to see, but see. Insanity says: I hate living but love life. Hate the rules but do like me. So, rather than drop in graves, I hide out. Not in liquor, nor in bed under sheets, nor in a needle's prick or snuffs of white powder, but in madness. On my own shelf, in my own rafters, under my own silent roof. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sand and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
Ray Bradbury
JD/Dr Cox: The second you start blaming yourself for people's deaths, there's no coming back.
Bill Lawrence
The only reason people die, is because EVERYONE does it. You all just go along with it.It's RUBBISH, death. It's STUPID. I don't want nothing to do with it.
Neil Gaiman