Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 86

Everyone has their first date and the object is to hide your flaws. And then you're in a relationship, and it's all about hiding your disappointment. And then, once you're married, it's about hiding your sins.
Joss Whedon
Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
John Irving
Your path will change. Your destiny never will.""But what if I'm on the wrong path?""There is no wrong path. Not when it comes to destiny. There are only detours, you see.
Lauren Miller
...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.
James Agee
It's not worth it to build castles on the sand if they get destroyed by the waves of reality.
Mladen Đorđević
It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.
Cormac McCarthy
What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
Robert McKee
She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.
Cormac McCarthy
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
George R.R. Martin
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
John Irving
Trust is like glass. Lovely, but only a fool rests lots of weight on it.
Joe Abercrombie
You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.
J.K. Rowling
Our fate is determined in rooms that must be easy to clean
John Ajvide Lindqvist
Sheriff, are you suggestin' the victom was kidnapped?""I'm only statin' that, at this time, we have no body, only nonvital body parts...
Steve Alten
I'm not blessed, or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abbatoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.
Neil Gaiman
It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy -for any of its millions- to have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished. Wealth, rank or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.
Moss Hart
Fallibility in a leader is very trying. Isn’t it? They spill so much of other people’s blood.
James Clavell
An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.
Richard Russo
She has passed information to you. Figures names and facts. You have learnt nothing very much. But you have a splendid memory. It will help you when you start to learn.
Richard Llewellyn
To my amazement, miraculously, the lid suddenly loosened and slid all the way open, revealing its hidden cargo: A stack of small paper booklets. Dozens and dozens of them. Booklets made of ordinary sheets of white writing paper, folded in half, and hand-stitched along the spine. Booklets in remarkably pristine condition, all covered in a small, neat handwriting that I instantly recognized. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I could hardly breathe.
Syrie James
The center [of the supermarket] is for boxed, frozen, processed, made-to-sit-on-your-shelf-for-months food. You have to ask yourself, "If this food is designed to sit in a box for month and months, what is it doing inside my body?" Nothing good, that´s for sure.
Morgan Spurlock
If you like her, if she makes you happy, and if you feel like you know her---then don't let her go.
Nicholas Sparks
I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know if your happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll smile to yourself when you hear me going, he broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git. Oh you'll remember feeling sort of plesantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again?
Nick Hornby
I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.
Alan Bradley
Distance can ruin even the best of intentions.But I suppose it depends on how you look at it.Distance just adds a richness you would not otherwise get.People come. People go. They will 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 stories 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
Myrtle Mae, you have a lot to learn, and I hope you never learn it.
Mary Chase
Ladies who play with fire must remember that smoke gets in their eyes.
Mae West
Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.
Joss Whedon
Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.
Neil Gaiman
She knew what all smart women knew: Laughter made you live better and longer.
Gail Parent
Andy Dufresne: 'That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you...haven't you ever felt that way about music?'Red: 'I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here.'Andy: 'Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.' Red: 'Forget?'Andy: 'Forget that...there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside...that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.'Red: 'What're you talking about?'Andy: 'Hope.
Stephen King
How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.
Ray Bradbury
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
Nora Ephron
It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.
Stephen King
When you choose to look down on something, you render yourself incapable of understanding it.
Stewart Stafford
We all want to be stars. The idea of being revered and envied must be encoded somewhere deep in our DNA. So must the desire to revere and envy others we imagine to be better, more accepted, and more popular than we are. The only problem is that the most necessary qualities required to be a celebrity -- self-absorption, egomania, shamelessness -- are the least attractive in a friend.
Tonya Hurley
That’s because they don’t know,’ said Tyburn. ‘It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.
Ben Aaronovitch
God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.
Woody Allen
He was in conflict with himself. There was no enjoyment in the thought that he had escaped a great danger, and in the midst of his uneasy reflections he had a sudden breathless conviction that she made him feel old because he loved her. Then he felt a hatred of himself, gathering into one mighty heap all the fierce and bitter hatred he had cherished for others and pouring it out on himself.
Norbert Jacques
I guess the message in the songs is that is shouldn't matter if someone moves differently, or looks differently, or talks differently. Is biotic differently. What matters is that we're all thinking beings, and if we are thinking beings we ought to be able to find common ground somewhere.
Daniel Waters
The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act.But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.
Erich Segal
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so - which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end.
Paul Auster
You really love her don't you," she said.With all my heart."She looked as sad as I'd ever seen her.What's your heart telling you to do?"I don't know."Maybe", she said gently,"You're trying to hard to hear it.
Nicholas Sparks
There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.
Pamela Ribon
Humans elect leaders on the basis of the promises they make. We [vampires] try to elect ours based solely on the strength of their character.
Darren Shan
Whatever strength, courage... madness keeps us going, we find it, in times like these. You have it, soldier. It's what kept you alive all this time.
Danny Strong
The stars were going out now, one by one, dropping like pennies behind the television aerials and the skylights and the washing strung between the chimneys. The sky was still dark - a sated, navy-blue woman - but the grass was jittery with the expectation of dawn.
Peter S Beagle
Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.
Nora Ephron
It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.
Rod Serling
...most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t connected and are silly, like, “I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.
Mark Haddon
October arrived, spreading a damp chill over the grounds and into the castle. Madam Pomfrey, the nurse, was kept busy by a sudden spate of colds among the staff and students. Raindrops the size of bullets thundered on the castle windows for days on end; the lake rose, the flower beds turned into muddy streams, and Hagrid’s pumpkins swelled to the size of garden sheds.
J.K. Rowling
Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.
Ian McEwan
For the briefest moment, Jack's face formed the faintest smile as he considered fear and anxiety, the latter two of which often caused people to forget what truly mattered most.
Jermaine Watkins
They say that when a man is going to drown, when he finally gives up the struggle - it's sort of blissful, for a moment. And then he drowns.
John Hodge
Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
Arthur Somers Roche
A mystifying sensation of loneliness shook him. Arthur had been alone before, to be sure, but to be alone while surrounded by people, the one sane man in a mad place - that was loneliness.
Graham Moore
You know how it is. You feel a little different because other people have two parents, even if they’re divorced. It’s like you grow up knowing that you’re missing something important that everyone else has, but you don’t know exactly what it is. I remember hearing my friends talking about how their fathers wouldn't let them stay out late or didn't like their boyfriends. It used to make me so angry because they didn't even realize what they had. Do you know what I mean?
Nicholas Sparks
The air was motionless, carved, a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth, molded while soft to fit every house and every human being on the earth, and now hardened forever so that no man could move and no air ever came through. The earth rumbled down its alley like a golden bowling ball, shining.
Peter S Beagle
This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.
Leon Uris
Heaven would never be heaven without you.
Richard Matheson