Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 99

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Stephen King
And when the sun sets...then the night magic spreads out above your head; worlds and universes a-borning and a-dying—stars and planets and galaxies. And the bigger the telescope they can make, and the farther into the beyond they are able to penetrate, the greater grows the mystery.
Paul Gallico
Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.
Neil Gaiman
Who're you going with, then?" said Ron."Angelina," said Fred promptly, without a trace of embarrassment."What?" said Ron, taken aback. "You've already asked her?""Good point," said Fred. He turned his head and called across the common room, "Oi! Angelina!"Angelina, who had been chatting with Alicia Spinnet near the fire, looked over at him."What?" She called back."Want to come to the ball with me?"Angelina gave Fred a sort of appraising look."All right, then," she said, and she turned back to Alicia and carried on chatting with a bit of a grin on her face."There you go," said Fred to Harry and Ron, "piece of cake.
J.K. Rowling
He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.
Thomas Harris
Only a self-taught man can teach others
Girish Kohli
M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...
Neil Gaiman
I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No.""Then why do we come here?"He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said.And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.
Jonathan Tropper
You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river.
Neil Gaiman
Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story
Chuck Wendig
Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days...it will demand absolutely everything of you.
Christy Hall
I been watchin' you, workin day and night, slavin so hard you barely have time to catch your breath. People do that for three reasons. Either they crazy, or stupid, or tryin' to forget.
Nicholas Sparks
No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.
George Lucas
Makes a diff'rence, havin' a decent family,' he said. 'Me dad was decent. An' your mum an' dad were decent. If they'd lived, life woulda bin diff'rent, eh?''Yeah, I s'pose,' said Harry cautiously. Hagrid seemed to be in a very strange mood.'Family,' said Hagrid gloomily. 'Whatever yeh say, blood's important...
J.K. Rowling
Okay, even if we disagree on that point, we still need to keep living our lives, don't we?...
Susin Nielsen
I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.
Woody Allen
I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.
Neil Gaiman
I'm not going to lie: there are no good options here.
Jackson Lanzing
Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?
David Benioff
The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.
Cormac McCarthy
It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?
Stephen King
I guess I should thank you for totally making my morning. It’s not every day a stranger notices my perspiration level.- Dr. Jeri Asher (BLACK MARIAH - A Calling)
Richard Finney
To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed.
Christopher J. Nolan
Silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.
Nicholas Sparks
Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.
Neil Gaiman
What happened?" he demanded. "I heard an explosion!""Yeah.That was me. I set the boat alight.""What?""I set fire to the boat.""But we're on the boat!""I know.
Anthony Horowitz
Selfishness is easy to find. Selflessness is a much rarer beast.
Stewart Stafford
It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.
Stephen King
All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.
Rita Mae Brown
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
Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.
Neil Gaiman
Then don't. I can't help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would have never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and sheild it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
Cormac McCarthy
The verdict of this court is that the accused are guilty of witchcraft. The maximum penalty the law allows is to be burned to death.However, in view of your previous good background I am disposed to be lenient. I therefore sentence you to be burned alive.
Richard Curtis
Whenever a young thing wants to be free minus serious thought, she gets pregnant and then gets married. Voilà!
Rita Mae Brown
in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.
Cormac McCarthy
It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.
Christopher Bram
There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.
Stephen King
I dont believe knowing can save us. What isconstant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.
Cormac McCarthy
Everybody make words,' he continued. 'Everybody write things down. Children in school do lessons in my books. Teachers put grades in my books. Love letters sent in envelopes I sell. Ledgers for accountants, pads for shopping lists, agendas for planning week. Everything in here important to life, and that make me happy, give honour to my life.'The man delivered his little speech with such solemnity, such a grave sense of purpose and commitment, I confess that I felt moved. What kind of stationery store owner was this, I wondered, who expounded to his customers on the metaphysics of paper, who saw himself as serving an essential role in the myriad affairs of humanity? There was something comical about it, I suppose, but as I listened to him talk, it didn't occur to me to laugh.
Paul Auster
The music grew louder, faster, as we saw an empty couch on the balcony and ran to get it, pushed aside another couple darting for the same thing, but it was ours, and we smiled wide, laughing at our fortune, our couch.
Lee Matthew Goldberg
Ginny, listen...I can't be involved with you anymore. We've got to stop seeing each other. We can't be together.""It's for some stupid noble reason isn't it?""It's been like...like something out of someone else's life these last few weeks with you. But I can't...we can't...I've got to do things alone now. Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to. He's already used you as bait once, and that was just because you were my best friend's sister. Think how much danger you'll be in if we keep this up. He'll know, he'll find out. He'll try and get me through you.""What if I don't care?""I care. How do you think I'd feel if this was your funeral...and it was my fault...
J.K. Rowling
Philosophers have a long tradition of marrying stupid women, from Socrates on. They think it clever.
Simon Gray
You want to know, but are afraid to ask, whether or not I found someone. If there could be anyone to fill that hole in my heart after I lost him. I did. "Life is futile," says my new therapist, Michaela, "and no one gets out of it alive. There is only love.
Emma Forrest
My ignorance is essential. I do not write what I know but what I need to know.
Don Murray
So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.
Stephen King
There’s no hope for someone who doesn’t even know what hope is
Eric Garcia
nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation forWeak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one’s home universe, or as a longing for versions of one’s self that one will never, and can never know.
Charles Yu
Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.
Alan Bradley
You were contemplating the mountain, Mr. Conway?" Came the inquiry."Yes, it's a fine sight. It has a name, I suppose?""It is called Karakal""I don't think I've ever heard of it. Is is very high?""Over twenty-eight thousand feet.""Indeed? I didn't realize there would be anything on that scale outside the Himalayas. Has it been properly surveyed? Whose are the measurements?""Whose would you expect, my dear sir? Is there anything incompatible between monasticism and trigonometry?
James Hilton
Jealousy is a disease, it's like a poison.
Francesca Marciano
It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.
David Nicholls
I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.
Neil Gaiman
I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.
Françoise Sagan
It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. (“The Disinheritors”)
Richard Matheson
When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
Stephen King
An old Russian proverb . . . "Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear."The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the trick was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful. There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate.Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize.
Philip Wylie
But most of all," she said, "I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all dayand look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going. Sometimes I even go to the Fun Parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy.Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and doyou know what?""What?""People don't talk about anything.""Oh, they must!""No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and sayhow swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the cafes they have the jokeboxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the coloured patterns running up and down, but it's only colour and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now.
Ray Bradbury
Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday's T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early -- it's summer vacation, after all -- and Tyler can't seem to make him understand that every day is important, especially those filled with warmth and sunlight and no particular responsibilities. It's as if there's some little voice deep inside him, warning him not to waste a minute, not a single one, because time is short.
Stephen King
The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
Cormac McCarthy
Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.
Stephen King