Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 59

The universe was a vast expanse, far greater than he could ever conceive, and he had seen but a fraction of an inch of it.
C. Robert Cargill
My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.
J.K. Rowling
For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.
Stephen King
I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.
Nicholas Sparks
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.
Cormac McCarthy
But if it matters to you, you'll be able to choose Gryffindor over Slytherin. The Sorting Hat takes your choice into account.""Really?""It did for me," said Harry.He had never told any of his children that before, and he saw the wonder in Albus's face when he said it.
J.K. Rowling
Sometimes dead is better
Stephen King
Time's the thief of memory
Stephen King
But I'm really enjoying my retirement. I get to sleep in every day. I do crossword puzzles and eat cake.
Derek Landy
Such grave matters as sin and forgiveness should remain between man and God
Stephen King
Don't you understand brother? I want to find a love...that will free me from this love...
Neil Jordan
And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.
Mario Puzo
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
Neil Gaiman
Maybe this isn't home, nor ever was- maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.
Stephen King
You haunt me. You alone. You're my fire. I'm your air." Nathaniel to Amelia
Saundra Mitchell
You with the tentacles, you're nicked!
Paul Cornell
I always hear people talk about 'dysfunctional families.' It annoys me, because it makes you think that somewhere there's this magical family where everyone gets along, and no one ever screams things they don't mean, and there's never a time when sharp objects should be hidden. Well, I'm sorry, but that family doesn't exist. And if you find some neighbors that seem to be the grinning model of 'function,' trust me - that's the family that will get arrested for smuggling arms in their SUV between soccer games.The best you can really hope for is a family where everyone's problems, big and small, work together. Kind of like an orchestra where every instrument is out of tune, in exactly the same way, so you don't really notice.
Neal Shusterman
To come devotedly into the depths of a subject, your respect for it increasing in every step and your whole heart weakening apart with shame upon yourself in your dealing with it : To know at length better and better and at length into the bottom of your soul your unworthiness of it : Let me hope in any case that it is something to have begun to learn.
James Agee
Rectory always sounded to me like a place you would find a proctologist.
Jeff Lindsay
Mamoon went on, “The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction.” He raised his glass. “All the best then, my friends. Here’s to a happy apocalypse.”“Happy apocalypse,” murmured the other guests, obediently.
Hanif Kureishi
Sometimes it's the tiniest things that can mean the difference between life and death.
Anthony Horowitz
I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.
Stephen Chbosky
Death is the ultimate negative.
Tom Stoppard
Unfortunately, the world does not always act in a manner consistent with one's plans for it.
Peter David
I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book of its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.
Neil Gaiman
The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now — he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again — but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don’t stop til you get enough.
Stephen King
Juno MacGuff: Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?
Diablo Cody
I'm going out to find her, to make things right, or atleast properly wrong.
Neal Shusterman
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
Jean-Luc Godard
There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.
Irvine Welsh
How do you judge the brightness of a light when you’re the source? A spotlight can never see the shadows it casts.
Neal Shusterman
The human beings must be mentally immensely strong, during the encounter with the true malevolence in others, because on it's own it doesn't belong to their species.
Mladen Đorđević
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
Paul Auster
I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?
Richard Russo
Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?
Ian McEwan
Not everyone believes in ghost’s, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?“ She had shaken her head slowly. "Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evie said. “That’s what ghost’s are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.
Stephen King
Well if manners maketh man make-up maketh woman.And we don't need a phalanx of behavioural scientists to explain why man judge women by their looks.Because the see bether than thay think.
Kathy Lette
It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't.
Lauren Miller
Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.
J.K. Rowling
It's a sad and beautiful world.
Jim Jarmusch
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
J.K. Rowling
Oh, yes. I'm terribly smart. Wouldn't it have been nice... to be intelligent?
William Inge
Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.
Rod Serling
Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.
Tom Stoppard
Because if its just you alone, you're not much of a threat.
J.K. Rowling
…Those who’ve marred their appearance in any way by their actions in life aren’t forced to witness that marring. If they were, they’d become self-conscious and be unable to concentrate on improving themselves.
Richard Matheson
I was very sorry to hear about your losses. Your brother was a terrible traitor, I know, but if we start killing men at weddings they'll be more frightened of marriage than they are presently. (Olenna Tyrell to Sansa Stark
George R.R. Martin
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Françoise Sagan
When we first met, I didn't want to get involved with anyone. I didn't have the time or energy, and I wasn't sure that I was ready for it. But you were so good to me, and I got swept up in that. And little by little, I found myself falling in love with you.
Nicholas Sparks
There's no shame in fear, my father told me, what matters is how we face it.
George R.R. Martin
How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time...
Neil Gaiman
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.
Stephen King
After the boy at the supermarket had called her those names, Evelyn Couch had felt violated. Raped by words. Stripped of everything. She had always tried to keep this from happening to her, always been terrified of displeasing men, terrified of the names she would be called if she did. She had spent her life tiptoeing around them like something lifting her skirt stepping through a cow pasture. She had always suspected that if provoked, those names were always close to the surface, ready to lash out and destroy her.
Fannie Flagg
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview(Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
Ray Bradbury
Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.
David Mamet
The divorce papers remained unopened in the crisp yellow envelope. He had thrown it on his desk without a backward glance. Between his lashes, his dark chocolate eyes burned with fury but there was something else in the depths that she hadn’t seen in a long time, passion.
Suzan Battah
How old are you?""About fifteen, I think. Though I still feel the same as I always did," Bod said, but Mother Slaughter interrupted, "And I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Neil Gaiman
What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
Nick Hornby
Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.
Darren Shan
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Stanley Kubrick