Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 65

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily laying down.
Woody Allen
Keep the change," he smiled. Was there ever a more empowering phrase than "Keep the change"?
David Nicholls
He took the woman from her bed, pretending not to notice the question posed in his mind: Why do you always experiment on women? He didn't care to admit that the inference had any validity. She just happened to be the first one he's come across, that was all. What about the man in the living room, though? For God's sake! he flared back. I'm not going to rape the woman!Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood?He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.Makes a good excuse, doesn't it, Neville? Oh, shut up.
Richard Matheson
Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.
John Banville
I doubt I'm any wiser than I was five hundred years back. I'm older. I've been up, and been down, and been up again. Have I learned aught? I've learned from my mistakes, but I've had more time to commit more mistakes.
Neil Gaiman
What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have the obligation to use it as best as you can. Don’t you agree?
Neil Gaiman
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
John Banville
I've never met a soldier who knew he was a hero. It's not false modesty. They simply decide to do something that they know they must do, usually for there comrades, because if they don't, those people will suffer in some way. For them, that compulsion is far stronger than any fear. The fact we find it exceptional is a sad indictment of the human race. I'd like to live in a world of heroes. If we did, there would be no wars.
Karen Traviss
We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams into words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.
Neil Gaiman
A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work; you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope.
Steven Pressfield
I think love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.
Peter S Beagle
To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.
John Osborne
The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it...
Nicholas Sparks
Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
Neil Gaiman
Virtue has its own reward but no sale at the box office.
Mae West
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
Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.
Gore Vidal
It made me wonder if there is much difference in our hearts between love and grief. they both have a yearning that seems unable to be satisfied.
Suzanne Kelman
Come with me to howling tree?""What?""Howling tree. It's a place a found. Come on
Debbie Moon
A robin perched on the branch of the apple tree, his feathers ruffled, his red chest blazing.'No need to look so down in the mouth,' he chirruped. 'Things'll get worse before they get better.''I don't know what it is about that tree,' Geno grumbled, 'that makes everything that sits in it talk in proverbs.''It's easier than thinking,' the robin stated.
Felix Salten
I’m using Mao as my inspiration. “Cast away illusions. Prepare for struggle.” I’m back in business, baby. You don’t know you’re stuck until you get moving.
Hanif Kureishi
Rationality and calm self-determination were one of the great illusions of the universe... in the end, we were all ruled by our passions.
Michael R. French
Media has the ability to make good seem evil and evil seem good.
Duncan William Gibbons
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
Bruce Feirstein
I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.
Neil Gaiman
Hello, IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again?... OK, well, the button on the side. Is it glowing?... Yeah, you need to turn it on.... Err, the button turns it on.... Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you?... No, not on clothes... I'm sorry, are you from the past?
Graham Linehan
I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.
Neil Gaiman
There is a room in the Department of Mysteries, that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that reside there. It is the power held within that room that you possess in such quantities and which Voldemort has not at all. That power took you to save Sirius tonight. That power also saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests. In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.
J.K. Rowling
Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.
Emma Thompson
God knows I'm not perfect, either. I've made tons of stupid mistakes, and later I regretted them. And I've done it over and over again, thousands of times; a cycle of hollow joy and vicious self-hatred. But even so, every time I learned something about myself-Misato Katsuragi
Hideaki Anno
I bet that dog-walking trollop called the cops on us. - Esme from Sister Mischief
Laura Goode
Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.
Neil Gaiman
You only truly believe that which moves you to action.
Douglas Cheney
I'm probably the only person in the world that feels physical pain as a reaction to joy.
Kara Lee Corthron
Wanting to be liked can get in the way of truth.
Delia Ephron
So what's the problem?’‘No problem. There's no problem. Don't ever say what's the problem, nthat's the negative way of looking at things, you know like is the bottle half empty or half full, know what I mean, every problem is also an opportunity, the question here is what opportunity does this present us with?’‘It seems to me’, said Ernest stubbornly, ‘that this opportunity presents us with a problem. Is there a director that Virginia would like?
Jonathan Lynn
One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.
Joe Abercrombie
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
Woody Allen
Technology is neutral. But the process of technology will cause a free world to become ever freer, and a totalitarian world to become ever more repressive.
Ma Boyong
Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
Neil Gaiman
In dreams, we enter a world that’s entirely our own.
J.K. Rowling
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal
I had to wonder, though, if there's something about a murderer, particularly a confident one, that gives him a certain charisma or charm that I, in particular, am susceptible to.I mean, there's a reason more women are attracted to Dracula than repelled by him.I made a resolution to myself. From now on, I'd assume that every man I was attracted to was a murderer until proven otherwise.Perhaps it wasn't the most promising strategy for starting a relationship, but I might live longer.
Lee Goldberg
Personal opinion time: some of the bravest, strangest, coolest stories right now are being told in the young adult space. It's stuff that doesn't fly by tropes or adhere to rules -- appropriate, perhaps, since young adults tend to flick cigarettes in the eyes of the rules and don't play by social norms as much as adults do.
Chuck Wendig
Whenever she walked along the streets of Manhattan, she looked at all the different faces coming toward her and, despite their different features and colors, she regarded them all as Americans.
Francesca Marciano
I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?
Ray Bradbury
All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.
Woody Allen
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.
Ray Bradbury
When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.
William Goldman
(...) Taking the journalist's vow of impartiality and objectivity was not unlike joining an order of monks and spending the rest of your life in a glass monastery - removed from the world of human affairs even as it continued to whirl around you on all sides. To be a journalist meant you could never be the person who tossed the brick through the window that started the revolution. You could only watch the man toss the brick, you could try to understand why he had tossed the brick, you could explain to others what significance the brick had in starting the revolution, but you yourself could never toss the brick or even stand in the mob that was urging the man to throw it.
Paul Auster
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.
Christopher Bram
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got To Get You Off My Mind', but then realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh there are loads of rules.
Nick Hornby
This violent state of mind.This violent state of mine.
Don Winslow
One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.
Stephen King
Cheese!" I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.
Alan Bradley
Guess that's thirty-one pieces of silver you've got now, huh? Sleep well, Judas.
Mark Millar
Faith is ... knowing with your heart.
N. Richard Nash
There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.
Peter S Beagle
There comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.
Max Brooks