Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 68

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
Robert McKee
Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight.
Stephen King
I have a thing for evil bald bad guys. The Kurgan is too sexy.
Ernest Cline
Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)
Maria Semple
I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.
George MacDonald Fraser
People are only rational on the surface.
Stephen King
Most of my kin are bastards," [Tyrion] said with a wry smile, "but you're the first I've had to friend.
George R.R. Martin
I see you are —”“Dumbledore’s man through and through,” said Harry. “That’s right.
J.K. Rowling
I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.
Stephen King
I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out.
Neil Gaiman
I only wanted to tell you that this was the wonderful time for you. Don’t let any of it go by without enjoying it. There won’t be any more merry-go-rounds. No more cotton candy. No more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you, Martin, that this is the wonderful time. Now! Here! That’s all. That’s all I wanted to tell you.
Rod Serling
Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.
Thomas Harris
Farewell, Timothy Riley’s Bar," Lane said softly. "Home of the nickel beer. Snooker emporium. Repository of Bluebird records, three for a dime. We honor you and your passing. Farewell. Farewell, Timothy Riley—and terraplanes and rumbleseats and saddle shoes and Helen Forrest and the Triple-C camps and Andy Hardy and Lum ‘n’ Abner and the world-champion New York Yankees! Rest in peace, you age of innocence—you beautiful, serene, carefree, pre-Pearl Harbor, long summer night. We’ll never see your likes again.
Rod Serling
It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.
Dennis Lehane
Where does contagion end and art begin?
Neil Gaiman
Women aren't very bright," Rip says. "Studies have been done.
Bret Easton Ellis
True worship leaders worship the Lord at all times and use songs only when necessary.
Gangai Victor
One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them.
Richard Russo
[Prince Humperdinck] was seventy-five minutes away from his first female murder, and he wondered if he could get his fingers to her throat before even the start of a scream. He had been practicing on giant sausages all the afternoon and had the movements down pretty pat, but then, giant sausages weren’t necks and all the wishing in the world wouldn’t make them so.
William Goldman
...Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.
Neil Gaiman
Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page.
Sidney Sheldon
The Idea of Ghost, like the Idea of North. A mere looped whisper, in darkness or in light. And no matter what this person may have been like before he or she died, no matter what they--specifically--might have wanted, ghosts only really want one thing: you, with them.Not to be alone. Not to be trapped. Not to be where they are. Not to be.
Gemma Files
They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.
Stephen King
He told himself she wasn’t really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear.
David Goodis
I must court her now,' said the Prince. 'Leave us alone for a minute.' He rode the white expertly down the hill.tButtercup had never seen such a giant beast. Or such a rider.t'I am your Prince and you will marry me,' Humperdinck said.tButtercup whispered, 'I am your servant and I refuse.'t'I am your Prince and you cannot refuse.'t'I am your loyal servant and I just did.'t'Refusal means death.'t'Kill me then.'t'I am your Prince and I’m not that bad — how could you rather be dead than married to me?'t'Because,' Buttercup said, 'marriage involves love, and that is not a pastime at which I excel. I tried once, and it went badly, and I am sworn never to love another.' t'Love?' said Prince Humperdinck. 'Who mentioned love? Not me, I can tell you. Look: there must always be a male heir to the throne of Florin. That’s me. Once my father dies, there won’t be an heir, just a king. That’s me again. When that happens, I’ll marry and have children until there is a son. So you can either marry me and be the richest and most powerful woman in a thousand miles and give turkeys away at Christmas and provide me a son, or you can die in terrible pain in the very near future. Make up your own mind.'t'I’ll never love you.'t'I wouldn’t want it if I had it.'t'Then by all means let us marry.
William Goldman
It's nice to have things to look forward to.
Stephen Chbosky
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
Tom Stoppard
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Gore Vidal
Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn't so messed up, it wouldn't be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn't.
Nick Hornby
Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul’s journeying.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don't you, Father Stone?
Ray Bradbury
No, forget love, the best we can hope to mould, given the poor Play-Doh of humankind, is a capacity for tolerance. This is achievable since tolerance is little more than indifference with a Dulux coat of manners. Surely we can manage that? Call me a dreamer but I can see a world where people of all races, creeds and colour will live together in harmony because they don't give a toss about each other.
Ian Pattison
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it
Elmore Leonard
The scent of him was subtle, beautifully fresh, and she couldn’t think clearly. No man had ever brought out these intense feelings in her. Chris Augustine was dangerous and she could get lost in his arms.
Suzan Battah
I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.
Stephen King
Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North - meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.
Steven Pressfield
Without balance, a life is no longer worth the effort.
Olen Steinhauer
Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.
Stephen King
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it
Roald Dahl
The audience-- the book's actual cast-- quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material-- surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality-- had to be reshaped.
Bret Easton Ellis
In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
Stephen King
Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.
Stephen King
The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.
Stanley Kubrick
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is nothing. Catelyn
George R.R. Martin
No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers, and sweet autumns.
Ray Bradbury
Strength to your arm, then.
George R.R. Martin
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
Stephen King
It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.
Hanif Kureishi
The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have instead of what you don't have.
Woody Allen
It unscrews the other way.
J.K. Rowling
There is something about yourself that you don't know. Something that you will deny even exists until it's too late to do anything about it. It's the only reason you get up in the morning, the only reason you suffer the shitty boss, the blood, the sweat and the tears. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are. "Fear or revere me, but please think I'm special." We share an addiction. We're approval junkies. We're all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch. The "hip, hip, hoo-fucking-rah." Look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Cos we're just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others.
Guy Ritchie
Lupita thought that people who didn’t dance were selfish and lonely.
Laura Esquivel
There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But... this is what God wants of you.
Stephen King
old stories are like old friends (...) you have to visit them from time to time.
George R.R. Martin
I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.
Christopher J. Nolan
You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain't long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living.
Joe Abercrombie
...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.
George R.R. Martin
There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men.
Neil Gaiman
See? Memories aren't happy, they're sad. Don't you know anything?
Morris Gleitzman
Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.
Stephen King