Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 56

And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.
Tom Schulman
We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want - or near enough.
Roald Dahl
I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad.
Ned Vizzini
He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said is was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation.
Cormac McCarthy
I find people confusing.
Mark Haddon
In the remote towns of the west there are few of the amenities of civilization; there is no sewerage, there are no hospitals, rarely a doctor; the food is dreary and flavourless from long carrying, the water is bad; electricity is for the few who can afford their own plant, roads are mostly non-existent; there are no theatres, no picture shows and few dance halls; and the people are saved from stark insanity by the one strong principle of progress that is ingrained for a thousand miles east, north, south and west of the Dead Heart - the beer is always cold.
Kenneth Cook
Happiness is important. Fun is everything.
Ray Bradbury
You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.
Stephen King
You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.
Neil Gaiman
Draco, do it, or stand aside so one of us -" screeched the woman, but at that precise moment the door to the ramparts burst open once more and there stood Snape, his wand clutched in his hand as his black eyes swept the scene, from Dumbledore slumped against the wall, to the four Death Eaters, including the enraged werewolf, and Malfoy."We've got a problem, Snape," said the lumpy Amycus, whose eyes and wand were fixed alike upon Dumbledore, "the boy doesn't seem able -"But somebody else had spoken Snape's name, quite softly."Severus ..."The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading.Snape said nothing, but walked forwards and pushed Malfoy roughly out of the way. The three Death Eaters fell back without a word. Even the werewolf seemed cowed.Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face."Severus ... please ..."Snape raised his wand and pointed it directly at Dumbledore. "Avada Kedavra!
J.K. Rowling
Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
Gore Vidal
I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Nick Cave
The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.
Larry McMurtry
What is a life?" Scapegrace continued. "Is life merely living? Is it having a heartbeat? Or is life the effect you have on others? Is it the effect you have on the world around you? If so, what have I done with mine? How have I wasted it?
Derek Landy
Look behind you now.Do you feel in your heart a slight hastening of its beat, and a powerful sense that something momentous is about to happen?... Perhaps, then, this is the hour that Mary Hightower takes to the sky with thousands Afterlights heading toward Memphis.... Perhaps this is the moment that Nick, the Chocolate Ogre, arrives in the same city in search for Allie, only to find that he has no idea where to look.... Perhaps this is the very instant that a monster called the McGill arrives there as well, aching to ease his pain by sharing his misery - not only with his new minions, but with anyone he can.... And perhaps you can sense, in some small twisting loop of your gut, the covergence of the wrong, of the right, and the woefully misguided. If you do, then pay sharp attention to the moment you wake, and the moment you fall asleep.... For maybe then you will know, without a shadow of doubt, which is which.
Neal Shusterman
Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?
Stephen King
War has changed.It's no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It's an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mercenaries and machines.War--and it's consumption of life--has become a well-oiled machine.War has changed.ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities.Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control…everything is monitored and kept under control.War…has changed.The age of deterrence has become the age of control, all in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction, and he who controls the battlefield, controls history.War…has changed.When the battlefield is under total control, war becomes routine.
David Hayter
But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool Girl – I couldn’t have been Cool Girl with anyone else. I wouldn’t have wanted to. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it: I ate a MoonPie, I walked barefoot, I stopped worrying. I watched dumb movies and ate chemically laced foods. I didn’t think past the first step of anything, that was the key. I drank a Coke and didn’t worry about how to recycle the can or about the acid puddling in my belly, acid so powerful it could strip clean a penny. We went to a dumb movie and I didn’t worry about the offensive sexism or the lack of minorities in meaningful roles. I didn’t even worry whether the movie made sense. I didn’t worry about anything that came next. Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment, and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber. But also happy.
Gillian Flynn
I am not shy about admitting my modest talents. For example, I am happy to admit that I am better than average at clever remarks, and I also have a flair for getting people to like me. But to be perfectly fair to myself, I am ever-ready to confess my shortcomings, too, and a quick round of soul-searching forced me to admit that I had never been any good at all at breathing water. As I hung there from the seat belt, dazed and watching the water pour in and swirl around my head, this began to seem like a very large character flaw.
Jeff Lindsay
Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it.
George R.R. Martin
Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.
George R.R. Martin
The things of the world fell by the wayside . . . but literature was eternal.
Stephen King
I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.
Dennis Lehane
Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender?
J.K. Rowling
Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't.
Neil Gaiman
Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will.' Her lips touched his cheek. 'I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.
David Nicholls
They're the perfect loving fam'ly, so adoring...And I love them ev'ry day of ev'ry week.So my son's a little shit, my husband's boring,And my daughter, though a genius, is a freak.
Brian Yorkey
Lem glowered. "Your lion friends ride into some village, take all the food and every coin they find, and call it foraging. the wolves as well, so why not us? no one robbed you, dog. You just been good and foraged.
George R.R. Martin
Do you drink?""Of course,I just said I was a writer.
Stephen King
Parvati positively beamed. Harry could tell that she was feeling guilty for having laughed at Hermione in Transfiguration. He looked around and saw that Hermione was beaming back, if possible even more brightly. Girls were very strange sometimes.
J.K. Rowling
The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.Enough about that.The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.And now it's not.
Nora Ephron
There's a school of thought today that rejects patriotism. People are made nervous by that intense allegiance to a country. They think it can only lead to war and bloodshed and that fights can be avoided if we all just compromise and get along. And, of course, compromise and getting along are great things as long as you're not sacrificing essential values. But I believe there's a line in the sand, some things that you have to be willing to stand up for, even if it means trouble. Charlie's patriotism is not blind, flag-waving jingoism: it's an intense allegiance to the American concept of liberty. He's through and through. He can talk about it and explain it. And he's shown he's willing to give everything for it. I admire him for that.
Andrew Klavan
It sounds like a terrible idea,” said Friday. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.
R.A. Spratt
Then a begging brother in a tattered brown robe said a blessing on his sword, and a maid kissed his cheek. 'They are for me,' "Why?" He asked Pate. "What am I to them?" "A knight who remembered his vows," the smith said.
George R.R. Martin
I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?
Jesse Andrews
Don't open the door to strangers," said her dad. "Unless they're selling something. Then open the door and see if I'd like it. If I'd like it, buy it for me. But nothing cheap. I have standards. Nothing too expensive, either. My standards aren't that high.
Derek Landy
In that moment, Dan was reminded why he wanted to write in the first place. It was the same reason anybody does anything -- to impress women.(Jeremy Goodwin, Sports Night)
Aaron Sorkin
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.
Ian McEwan
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.
Joe Abercrombie
Let me tell ya. You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it's a sin if you don't reach back... I'm telling you.
Matthew Quick
I think that's nice, and if I could have feelings at all I would have them for Deb.
Jeff Lindsay
What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin. Words are a gift to the dead and a warning to the living.
Doug Dorst
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.
Stephen Chbosky
Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.
Cormac McCarthy
What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin.
Doug Dorst
At times he felt that he had almost rather not be in love with her, for it brought him no peace. What was the use of it, if it was only going to be painful?
Larry McMurtry
The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be "off-loaded" to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion.
Lawrence Wright
And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.
Neil Gaiman
Lots of things are mystries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.
Mark Haddon
And at last she woke up in the middle of one warm night and said, "Yes, but now.
Peter S Beagle
My luck was my father not striking oil... we'd have been rich. I'd never have set out for Hollywood with my camera and I'd have had a lot less interesting life.
King Vidor
Vengeance is a way of clinging to what we have lost. A wedge in the Last Door, and through the crack we can still glimpse the faces of the dead. We strain towards it with all our being, break every rule to have it, but when we clutch it, there is nothing there. Only grief.
Joe Abercrombie
He rose and stood tottering in that cold dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination... Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
Cormac McCarthy
I... I don't, I don't think I can do this.""Do what?"It didn't answer."Do the tests?""I can't work with you when you're like this!" it blurted. "To every one of my specimens, I am the last thing they see! Terrror is what I am used to-- terror is what I like! I prefer my subjects to scream and beg, not ask to see results!""I'll scream my questions, if that helps.""It won't," it said sadly. "I'll know you're only trying to make me feel better.
Derek Landy
Someday an opportunity will come. Think about Harry Potter. His life is terrible, but then a letter arrives, he gets on a train, and everything is different for him afterward. Better. Magical.""That's just a story.""So are we- we're stories too.
Matthew Quick
There's a thing that happens in Hollywood, when you hand in a script with magic in it, and the people at the studio who read it say "We don't quite understand... can you explain the rules? What are the rules here? The magic must have rules" and sometimes when they say that to me I explain that I am sure it does, just as life has rules, but they didn't give me a rule book to life when I was born, and I've been trying to figure it out as I go along, and I am sure it is the same thing for magic; and sometimes I explain that, yes, the magic has rules, and if they read again carefully they can figure out what they are; and sometimes I sigh and put in a line here and a line there that spells things out, says, YES THESE ARE THE RULES YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION and then everyone is very happy.
Neil Gaiman
The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.
George R.R. Martin
You move on. You move back. On because you're always getting older, back because there's always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.
Mike Carey
It's the way you fall you. Gotta let yourself go.
Melville Shavelson
Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flamethrower.
Bruce Feirstein