Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 63

Snow... blots and softens the top of every object like ice on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.
Mark Haddon
If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.
Cormac McCarthy
It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt...
Ray Bradbury
If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt -- and fueled even more than Hollywood by money -- if that's possible.
Ben Affleck
Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.
Dennis Lehane
•tThey’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and they’re so proud of themselves, and so puffed up from being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.
Neil Gaiman
It was one of the few stories we told the same way.
Gillian Flynn
She doesn't acknowledge Tucker, and there's no thank you for the cigarettes. She says a person shows their gratitude by action, not by words. So I guess that means she thanks me by smoking every cigarette in every pack.
Peter Hedges
I'm a mother," said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, "and I know what I know.
Neil Gaiman
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
Raymond Chandler
You are an honest and honorable man, Lord Eddard. Ofttimes I forget that. I have met so few of them in my life.” He glanced around the cell. “When I see what honesty and honor have won you, I understand why.
George R.R. Martin
A dozen great fires raged under the city walls, where casks of burning pitch had exploded, but the wildfire reduced them to no more than candles in a burning house, their orange and scarlet pennons fluttering insignificantly against the jade holocaust.
George R.R. Martin
And she says she wants to expose me to all these great things. And to tell you the truth, I don't really want to be exposed to all these great things if it means that I'll have to hear Mary Elizabeth talk about all the great things she exposed me to all the time. I don't understand that. I would give someone a record so they could love the record, not so they would always know that I gave it to them.
Stephen Chbosky
All creativity is a work in progress
Dean Cavanagh
Senses will lie as dreams wake. You are not on solid ground. Don't look down.
Brian McGreevy
and then you stopped. And looked at me. And I knew then exactly what was going to happen. You kissed me, yes. But it was not just goodnight. Even then, I could feel the promise in it. The promise that you would kiss me just like that, forever.
Nicholas Sparks
For him and his brother, he now knew, that music was real. Becuase all you had to do, really, was be willing to use your imagination. And listen.
Holly Goldberg Sloan
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Jean-Luc Goddard
The world doesn't change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.
Terry Hayes
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.
Ian McEwan
If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one's self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world.
Alan Bradley
Tomorrow is promissed to no one. We can not waste today.
Kirsten Beyer
Children should never have baths,’ my grandmother said. ‘It's a dangerous habit.’‘I agree, Grandmamma.
Roald Dahl
I've never met a politician who didn't deserve to be tossed into a pit full of Kallin," Beranabus grunts.
Darren Shan
Home is where they want you to stay longer
Stephen King
I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.
Stephen King
She would use her sexuality, but she would make it hers. She would use her beauty not to appeal to their desire, but to strike fear in the hearts of men.
Matt K. Turner
If a problem can't be solved within the frame it was conceived, the solution lies in reframing the problem.
Brian McGreevy
We also serve who only punctuate.
Brian Moore
…because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.
Alan Bradley
Because the thing of it is, no matter how much you enjoy sex, there’s something jolting and strangely disturbing about witnessing the sex of others. Nature has taken great pains to lay out the fundamentals of copulation so that it’s impossible to get a particularly good view of the sex you’re having. Because when you get right down to it, sex is a messy, gritty, often grotesque business to behold: the hairs; the abraded, dimpled flesh; the wide-open orifices; the exposed, glistening organs. And the violence of the coupling itself, primitive and elemental, reminding us that we’re all just dumb animals clinging to our spot on the food chain, eating, sleeping and fucking as much as possible before our something bigger comes along and devours us.
Jonathan Tropper
Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in every election. Ride your bike in the park. Dream about my perfect, golden body. Take your vitamins. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Pull for the Mets. Watch a lot of movies. Don’t work too hard at your job. Take a trip to Paris with me. Come to the hospital when Rachel has her baby and hold my grandchild in your arms. Brush your teeth after every meal. Don’t cross the street on a red light. Defend the little guy. Stick up for yourself. Remember how beautiful you are. Remember how much I love you. Drink one Scotch on the rocks every day. Breathe deeply. Keep your eyes open. Stay away from fatty foods. Sleep the sleep of the just. Remember how much I love you.
Paul Auster
There's a danger and a beauty to the moment which seems out of time. It pierces something deep inside of him, bypassing his rationale, and it touches his very core. In a sudden shock of illumination, and of knowing, he recognizes this woman is his destiny, and their fates are intertwined.
Scarlett Amaris
She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.
M.R. Carey
Life is a windowless room in the Hotel Bellevue.
Victoria Wood
Fantasy is a reaction to the constraints of reality.
Stewart Stafford
Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole.
J.K. Rowling
Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.
Chuck Wendig
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.
Paul Auster
... the sort of smiles used at weddings, turned on very carefully to half pressure to prevent them wearing out.
R.C. Sherriff
He’s my cat! He’s not God’s cat! Let God have his own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!
Stephen King
Apropos, you're going to have to learn to sooner or later that you can't just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn't be.
Peter David
His wits have gone dark as his eyes
George R.R. Martin
Humans should be permanently under development.
Graeme Simsion
You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.
Cormac McCarthy
Death doesn't really worry me that much, I'm not frightened about it... I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen
Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.
Christy Hall
I know something you do not know. I am not left-handed either.
William Goldman
Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.
Ray Bradbury
A mob always picked its own leaders, and it always picked the right ones.
Stephen King
I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life time for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain
Rita Mae Brown
He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
Cormac McCarthy
Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door. * * * They opened the door and stepped in.They stopped.The library deeps lay waiting for them.Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes.
Ray Bradbury
It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it.
Stephen King
... I guessed that when you are nearly a man, you have to learn to put up with a lot of aggravation from little old bitty kids.
Fred Gipson
Well, obviously, she's feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she's feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can't work out who she likes best. Then she'll be feeling guilty, thinking it's an insult to Cedric's memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she'll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry. And she probably can't work out what her feelings towards Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that's all very mixed up and painful. Oh, and she's afraid she's going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she's flying so badly." A slightly stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, then Ron said, "One person can't feel all that at once, they'd explode.
J.K. Rowling
In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written beneath myself. I have never written anything that I didn't want my name attached to. I have probed deeper in some scripts and I've been more successful in some than others. But all of them that have been on, you know, I'll take my lick. They're mine and that's the way I wanted them.
Rod Serling
You can't hang around waiting for somebody else to pull your strings. Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you. And if it throws more than you'd like, more than you think you can handle? Well then you just have to find the heroism within yourself and play out the hand you've been dealt. The universe never sets a challenge that can't be met. You just need to believe in yourself in order to find the strength to face it.
Darren Shan
Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.
Cormac McCarthy
You need to make a decision - are you are an imitator or an innovator?
Stewart Stafford