Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 62

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.
Nick Hornby
And anyway, life's too short....
J.K. Rowling
Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.
Stephen King
That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.
Nick Hornby
Somebody should have warned the Trojans. Beware of gifts bearing Greeks.
David Gerrold
To Vic and other kids his age, the past didn't exist except as a quick, oversimplified Wikipedia snippets, that ultimately didn't matter because they weren't now. Dolores wonders if that is all she really is, a little piece of now, relentlessly pushed forward by time, trying desperately to look back over her shoulder to see what the past could possibly tell her, but caught in a rush that refused to stand still long enough for her to hear what it had to say.
David Hontiveros
The word “future” and females is a dangerous combination.
Chetan Bhagat
He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there. Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them...They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers.
Ray Bradbury
Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.
David Mamet
Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Stephen King
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Ray Bradbury
Do you understand economics? I mean big-time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get how it worked? I don't, and anyone who says they do is full of shit.
Max Brooks
At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned
Cormac McCarthy
She pulls a spare head from beneath a pile of shoes and raises it by the hair. It looks like one of those cheap, blue heads that botwhores keep for lonely sci-fi freaks who want to pretend they’re fucking the queen of Xenon.
Judd Trichter
Don't normal people run in the rain? Even abnormal people, most of them anyway, the only people I can think of who walk in the rain are tree buffers, bag ladies, and total psychos.
Lisa O'Donnell
Even in dreams, you could not fall forever.
George R.R. Martin
I need to know how you did it it. I did it, said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, witch panache and style. That's how I did it.(Shadow & Mad Sweeney)
Neil Gaiman
You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you.
Nick Hornby
Are you happy?
Ray Bradbury
Jon:'What are you doing up there? Why aren't you at the feast?'Tyrion: 'Too hot, too noisy, and I'd drunk too much wine', the dwarf told him. 'I learned long ago that it is considered rude to vomit on your brother.
George R.R. Martin
My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in this, I believe – to experience language as a collection of sounds, to be forced to the surface of words where meanings vanish – but it was also quite wearing, and it had the effect of shutting me up in my thoughts.
Paul Auster
School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?
Ray Bradbury
It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself
Nick Hornby
If you're not failing you're not trying anything.
Woody Allen
When clouds of pain loom in the skyWhen a shadow of sadness flickers byWhen a tear finds its way to the eyeWhen fear keeps the loneliness aliveI try and console my heartWhy is it that you cry? I askThis is only what life impartsThese deep silences withinHave been handed out to all by timeEveryone’s story has a little sorrowEveryone’s share has a little sunshineNo need for water in your eyesEvery moment can be a new lifeWhy do you let them pass you by?Oh heart, why is it that you cry?
Javed Akhtar
I want a chance to do it all again. To do it… right.
Joe Abercrombie
Miracles happen on Christmas, Pat. Everybody knows that shit.
Matthew Quick
This inhuman place makes human monsters.
Stephen King
The notion of children makes me ill. The thought of having one... when you see those guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking idea of it, the very word: family. Whenever I see it, on travel brochures, on house schedules... I feel sick.
John Niven
When the end comes, I will meet it raging.
George R.R. Martin
It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.
John Irving
We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
Ray Bradbury
An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.
Federico Fellini
You winked, took the change. I should have seen it, Ed, as a sign that you were unreliable. Instead, I saw it as a sign of charming, which is why I didn't break it off right then and there.
Daniel Handler
The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.
George Miller
A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance
Joe Abercrombie
Absence makes the loins grow hotter.
Richard Castle
My father and I used to watch a ton of old horror movies when I was growing up. ’The Creature from the Black Lagoon‘ was one of my father’s favorites and he was very excited for me to see the film. But after the movie was over, I told him that I was kind of bored. I said to him, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but I saw the zipper in the back of the monster’s costume. From that point on, I was really never scared at all. The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t believe someone intentionally tipped off the target. And I maintain that no one made some horrendous mistake, which I’m now trying to cover up. I believe what really happened with the operation was that our target ended up seeing the zipper. Orlo Kharms realized something around him wasn’t… real. And he was able to avoid the trap we had laid out for him.
Richard Finney
It seems to happen sudden—a fighter gets good. He gets easy and graceful. He learns how to save himself—no energy wasted... he slips and slides— he travels with the punch. . . . Oh, sure, I like the way you're shaping up.
Clifford Odets
People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.
Nicholas Sparks
A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.
Stephen King
A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.
Nick Hornby
She had been a teenager once, and she knew that, despite the apparent contradictions, a person's teenage years lasted well into their fifties.
Derek Landy
Jane turned and looked at Rob who was still staring into space with a crazed look on his face. ‘Are you listening to this?’ she said as she thumped him on the arm. Rob turned to her and broke into a broad grin. ‘Listening to what?’ he laughed. ‘I’m loaded. I don’t have to listen to anything!’‘Yes you do,’ said England calmly. ‘You have to listen very carefully.
Dougie Brimson
When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing-
Stephen King
Quiet is here and all in me. ("Dress of White Silk")
Richard Matheson
You do not keep the audience's interest by giving it information, but by withholding information ....
Robert McKee
This book says 'life isn't fair' and I'm telling you, one and all, you betterbelieve it. I got a fat spoiled son�he's not gonna nab Miss Rheingold. And he's always gonna be fat, evenif he gets skinny he'll still be fat and he'll still be spoiled and life will never be enough to make himhappy, and that's my fault maybe�make it all my fault, if you want�the point is, we're not created equal,for the rich they sing, life isn't fair. I got a cold wife; she's brilliant, she's stimulating, she's terrific; there'sno love; that's okay too, just so long as we don't keep expecting everything to somehow even out for usbefore we die.
William Goldman
In the end, people should be judged by their actions, since in the end, it was actions that defined everyone.
Nicholas Sparks
He hurried to car and set off home, hoping he was imagining things, which he had never hoped before, because he didn't approve of imagination.
J.K. Rowling
I asked you here tonight because when you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
Graeme Simsion
I will not go back. No bad thing for me to die. I will make it happen so that it happens only once.
Shahrukh Husain
Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes
Sidney Howard
Right now, I am in Fallujah. I am in Darfur. I am on Sixty-third and Park having dinner with Ellen Barkin and Ron Perelman... Right now, I'm on Lafayette and Astor waiting to hit you up for change so I can get high. I'm taking a walk through the Rose Garden with George Bush. I'm helping Donald Rumsfeld get a good night's sleep...I was in that cave with Osama, and on that plane with Mohamed Atta...And what I want you to know is that your work has barely begun. And what I want you to trust is the efficacy of divine love if practiced consciously. And what I need you to believe is that if you hate who I love, you do not know me at all. And make no mistake, "Who I Love" is every last one. I am every last one. People ask of me: Where are you? Where are you?...Verily I ask of you to ask yourself: Where are you? Where are you?
Stephen Adly Guirgis
There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.
Stephen King
Your name?"The movements of the man's mouth didn't quite match what he was saying, so seeing him speak was a bit like watching a badly dubbed film."Alex Gardiner," Alex said. "Your real name?""I just told you.""You lied. Your real name is Alex Rider.""Why ask if you think you know?
Anthony Horowitz
Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two.
J.K. Rowling
Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.
Cormac McCarthy
I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.
Bruce Robinson
I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.
Richard Price