Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 94

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!
Christy Hall
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Stephen King
He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot.
Mark Haddon
And you have to be careful with illusionists: sometimes evil deceives us by assuming the simplest form of things.
Donato Carrisi
You are both stars, don’t forget.When the stars exploded billions ofyears ago, they formed everythingthat is this world. The moon, thetrees, everything we know isstardust. So don’t forget. Youare stardust.- ROSE PEDDLER
Richard Linklater
Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. you are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!? - think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin's and Pater's heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new - the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening?
Tom Stoppard
Does trust have to be earned. Or is it simply a matter of faith?
Nicholas Sparks
They'd put the anesthesia mask on him, and the next instant he was in the recovery room. It was a blackout so complete, it made him doubt the immortality of the soul.
Andrew Klavan
You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.
Stephen King
Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire.
Stephen King
Tut, tut — fame clearly isn't everything.
J.K. Rowling
The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years.
Ray Bradbury
What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn't it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn't be Venice, said Connie's voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.
David Nicholls
There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we ‘friend’ each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to – we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families, in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version – it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.
A.M. Homes
How do you know when you're God?" "When I pray to him I find I am talking to myself.
Peter Barnes
Thanks, Mom. Thanks for making me try out for this play.'I think I might have just made being a mother totally worthwhile for her.I will try to never forget her face...Mom's got tears in her eyes and she's smiling. It's an amazing look.I have to remember how powerful it can be to say thank you.Especially to the people you live with.
Holly Goldberg Sloan
What's it like?""Death? It's like being on holiday with a group of Germans.
Rob Grant
...it is hard to throw off long-established love:hard, but this you must managed somehow
J.K. Rowling
Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to 'think out of the box' and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when 'anything goes' and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.
Mark Forster
All they told me was that he was forty-two when he died. I just wanted...to find out more about what kind of person he was.I could tell you more, amanda thought to herself. A lot more. She'd suspected the truth since Morgan Tanner had called, and she'd made some calls to confirm her suspicions. Dawson, she'd learned, had been taking off life support at CarolinaEast Regional Medical Center late Monday night. He's been kept alive long after doctors knew he would never recover, because he was an organ donor.Dawson, she knews, had saved Alan's life-but in the end, he'd saved Jared's as well. And for that meant...everything. I gave you the best of me, he'd told her once, and with every beat of her son's heart, she knew he'd done exactly that. How about a quick hug," she said, "before we go inside?" Jared rolled his eyes, but he opened his arms anyway. "I love you, Mom," he mumbled, pulling her close. Amanda closed her eyes, feeling the steady rhythm in his chest. "I love you, too.
Nicholas Sparks
Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.
Neal Shusterman
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Christopher Nolan The Dark Knight
There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?" And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; "I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture." There comes an aha-moment for some folks - the lucky ones - when they suddenly recognize the difference.
Stephen King
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
John Irving
Some of the most thrilling things in life are done on impulse.
Syrie James
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
Raymond Chandler
Let the Unions become engines for the working people to right their wrongs. Not benefit societies, or burial clubs. Let the Unions become civilian regiments to fight in the cause of the people.
Richard Llewellyn
Hey, my spaghetti’s moving!” cried Mr. Twit, poking around in it with his fork.“It’s a new kind,” Mrs. Twit said, taking a mouthful from her own plate which of course had no worms. “It’s called Squiggly Spaghetti. It’s delicious. Eat it up while it’s nice and hot.
Roald Dahl
There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.
Stephen King
There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.
Nora Ephron
A million years ago - some hairy bastard daubed a horse on the wall of his cave, he saw it, he drew it - well done! Flash forward: 'Hello, welcome to my vlog. Today I bought a plum
Patrick Marber
There's always a 'she'. Isn't there?
Dennis Lehane
All he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months, he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night.
Ray Bradbury
Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.
Stephen King
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka.
Stephen King
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
Stephen King
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.
Stephen King
How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long time, listening to the warm crackle of the flames.
Ray Bradbury
I see you're a man with ideals. I better be going before you've still got them.
Mae West
You have neither the clout nor the experience to make a threat like that, Victor.
Bret Easton Ellis
Spiders... the spiders... they want me to tap-dance. And I don't want to tap-dance!
J.K. Rowling
Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.
Robert McKee
Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
Roger Ebert
Harry, despite your privileged insight into Voldemort’s world (which, incidentally, is a gift any Death Eater would kill to have), you have never been seduced by the Dark Arts, never, even for a second, shown the slightest desire to become one of Voldemort’s followers!”“Of course I haven’t!” said Harry indignantly. “He killed my mum and dad!”“You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!” said Dumbledore loudly.
J.K. Rowling
It's not so bad."Melancholia looked at her. "You're lying.""I'll get used to it. So will you.""I... I don't think I'll be able to.""I'll be there to help when you need it.""But I hate you."Valkyrie smiled. "No you don't.""No, I do. I want to kill you and stuff.""We actually became friends in those caves.""That's not what happened, " said Melancholia."We're pals. We're buddies.” "If my wrists weren't in shackles, my hands would be round your throat.""You want to hug my throat because we're friends.
Derek Landy
I feel I owe you another explanation Harry," said Dumbledore hesitantly. "You may, perhaps, wondered why I never chose you as a prefect? I must confess...that I rather thought...you had enough responsibility to be going on with."Harry looked up at him and saw a tear trickling down Dumbledore's face into his long silver beard.
J.K. Rowling
I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.
Neil Gaiman
Seventeen, eh!" said Hagrid as he accepted a bucket-sized glass of wine from Fred."Six years to the day we met, Harry, d’yeh remember it?""Vaguely," said Harry, grinning up at him. "Didn’t you smash down the front door, give Dudley a pig’s tail, and tell me I was a wizard?""I forge’ the details," Hagrid chortled.
J.K. Rowling
So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a shitload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don't feel like lying to you. She didn't have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn't fall in love. She seemed less pissed with me after my stupid outburst, but she basically just went from irritable to quiet.
Jesse Andrews
And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right.Happy Eighth birthday, blog.
Neil Gaiman
..I was raised on the Torah, my wife on the Qu'Ran, my eldest son is an Atheist, my youngest is a scientologist, my daughter is studying Hinduism, I imagine there is room there for a holy war in my living room, but we practice live and let live.
Jerome Bixby
She explains that often the people who mean the most to us have to be left behind because they cannot follow us along our destined path.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.
John Irving
Next time she’d have to ask him to keep the light on while he did it, so she could watch his face. That was the best part of the whole thing as far as she was concerned, the way a guy’s face contorted so violently and then relaxed, as if some terrible mystery had just been solved.
Tom Perrotta
You have to take your own bold approach, and if you do you will be rewarded with success. Or calamitous failure. That can happen too.
Steven Moffat
If you love Alex now, then love him forever. Make him laugh again, and cherish the time you spend together. Take walks and ride your bikes, curl up on the couch and watch movies beneath a blanket. Make him breakfast, but don't spoil him. Let him make breakfast for you as well, so he can show you he thinks you're special. Kiss him and make love to him and consider yourself lucky for having met him, for he's the kind of man who'll prove you right.
Nicholas Sparks
I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.
David Gerrold
In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.
Richard K. Morgan
She said they needed to put down a real root system to achieve their potential
Holly Goldberg Sloan
I think my reputation will look after itself," Holmes said. "If they hang me, Watson, I shall leave it to you to persuade your readers that the whole thing was a misunderstanding.
Anthony Horowitz