Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 83

He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him.
J.K. Rowling
The fridge had been emptied of all Dudley’s favorite things — fizzy drinks and cakes, chocolate bars and burgers — and filled instead with fruit and vegetables and the sorts of things that Uncle Vernon called “rabbit food.
J.K. Rowling
Find my weak points, but more importantly, find yours.
Gutteridge Rene
Yes, I might have been quiet and shy, the kind of person who did my best to keep my head down just to get through the day. But even then, I had never let people walk all over me. Even in the days when I didn't know a left hook from a karate chop, I'd still always found my own ways of fighting for the things I believed in.
Danielle Paige
You can't change laws without first changing human nature... You can't change human nature without first changing the law.
Neal Shusterman
It hurt to think that a boy would not have him at his value of himself.
Richard Llewellyn
God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.
Ray Bradbury
The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected.
Nicholas Sparks
A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.
Robert McKee
Nothing was true for long. In time, everything was deconstructed.
Sue Townsend
When I was your age, television was called books.
William Goldman
Of all the weapons she had commanded, Elizabeth knew the least of love; and of all the weapons in the world, love was the most dangerous.
Seth Grahame-Smith
It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.
Steven Pressfield
I was used to heat but this place was so dry the trees were bribing the dogs.
Irvine Welsh
Half-truths are worth more than outright lies.
George R.R. Martin
There is sitting and there is sitting. (...) Each one waits for the other to move, but the lion is poised, his tail twitching, while the fawn is frozen by fear, bowels turned to belly. No matter which way he bounds, the lion will have him, and he knows it.
George R.R. Martin
When in doubt go the library
J.K. Rowling
Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.
Harlan Ellison
People go their whole lives wanting to be admired for their hidden qualities.
Hanif Kureishi
Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.
Neil Gaiman
How quickly the dead faded into each other,
Ian McEwan
If we can't alter the tide of events, at least we can be nearby with towels to mop up.
Peter David
The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear - that something could happen to her at any moment, something I'd be helpless to stop - had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest.
Dennis Lehane
I'm afraid that the gift of visiting the past is all that we have. We can revisit it, but only as it happened.
Karen Essex
This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. No and no again. But still, there are words you will need to have. There are many of them. Many millions, I think. Perhaps only three or four. Excuse me. But I am doing well today. So much better than usual. If I can give you the words you need to have, it will be a great victory. Thank you. Thank you a million times over.
Paul Auster
And what have I done?" What? WHAT?...You've stolen them." With that, Cornelia fled, but Buttercup understood; she knew who "them" was. The boys. The beef-witted featherbrained rattledskulled clodpated dim-domed noodle-noggined sapheaded lunk-knobbed BOYS.
William Goldman
You like it in jail?""It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?
Raymond Chandler
If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up.
George R.R. Martin
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…
Stephen King
Now, watching her sleep, and closing his eyes, he felt, in this particular intimacy - stowed beneath her duvet - that he was intruding. At the same time, he knew, settling down, you couldn´t dislike anyone you'd seen sleep
Hanif Kureishi
The Brigadier had no wish to shake hands with the improbable young man in the ridiculous frock-coat.
Peter Grimwade
Earlier this year, I'd told a mother at school I'd been married fifteen year. She asked, "What's the secret to a long marriage?" I thought for a second, then answered, "Staying married.
Maria Semple
She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.
Stephen King
I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." . . . Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Roger Ebert
They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
Ray Bradbury
Observation is a dying art.
Stanley Kubrick
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a word is worth a million pictures. A billion. As many as there are people who know the word. Each has their own picture, their own meaning of it, in their heads. It's theirs. It's unique. And yet they share it with everyone else. And every time they use a word, a single word, they contribute to the creation of the soul of us all.
Richard Tillotson
You’re as plain as the nose on your face,” said Mr. Pennyworth. “And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody.
Neil Gaiman
When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.
Cormac McCarthy
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Paul Auster
Mawdryn stared at the Brigadier with such a look of pain and longing. For a moment the old soldier's mind went back thirty-five years to his first taste of action as a young lieutenant in Palestine, with his platoon badly shot up by terrorists, and he remembered the mangled conscript who screamed at the officer to take his rifle and kill him.
Peter Grimwade
As far as informing the headmaster, Harry had no idea where Dumbledore went during the summer holidays. He amused himself for a moment, picturing Dumbledore, with his long silver beard, full-length wizard's robes, and pointed hat, stretched out on a beach somewhere, rubbing suntan lotion onto his long crooked nose.
J.K. Rowling
Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.
Neil Gaiman
The worst that you can say about him (God) is that basically he's an underachiever.
Woody Allen
Let us pray now for the future dead. Though we do not yet know their names, we know that there shall be far too many of them.
Seth Grahame-Smith
I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. 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
If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.
Neil Gaiman
I must be overtired', Buttercup managed. 'The excitement and all.''Rest then', her mother cautioned. 'Terrible things can happen when you're overtired. I was overtired the night your father proposed.
William Goldman
New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.
Gillian Flynn
The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.
George R.R. Martin
What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.
Stephen King
The ones that love us never really leave us.
J.K. Rowling
When you use more than 3-5% of your brain, you don't want to be on Earth!"-Bob Diamond, Interdimensional Attorney, from the Albert Brooks' movie, Defending Your Life
Albert Brooks
Once she had loved Prince Joffrey with all her heart, and admired and trusted her his mother, the queen. They had repaid that love and trust with her father's head. Sansa would never make that mistake again.
George R.R. Martin
I suppose even a simple slogan can be twisted into whatever shape we want, like a balloon animal—we can even make it loop back around on itself, becoming a noose. In the end, the measure of who we are can be seen in the shapes of our balloon animals.
Neal Shusterman
Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright.
Mario Puzo
There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.
Ray Bradbury
I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
William Goldman
The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.
Douglas Kennedy
Oh well... I'd just been thinking, if you had died, you'd have been welcome to share my toilet.
J.K. Rowling