20th-century Screenwriter Quotes

Woody Allen

Stanley Kubrick

John Steinbeck

Roald Dahl

Astrid Lindgren

Orhan Pamuk

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Boychick, wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life, for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new. Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills.

There comes a point in many people's lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.

Brian Moore (novelist)

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.

Jacques Prévert

The key point about a demonstration is that it must be seen. Hence the term "demonstration." If a person demonstrates privately in his own home, this is not technically a demonstration but merely "acting silly" or "behaving like an ass.

My point about alcohol is that if you abuse something, it abuses you back.

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.

My corn I take serious because it's my corn, and my potatoes and my tomatoes and fences I take note of because they're mine. But this war is not mine and I take no note of it!

James Lee Barrett

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

Roberto Rossellini

Attention vermin, you are in the presence of a colossus.

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.

Heroes, while it was cancelled last year for low ratings on the network, ironically was the number one downloaded show in the world that year above shows like Lost and 24 and that kind of thing. For a show like Heroes that had all of these illegal downloading, pirating, I wore that as a badge of honour. That's exactly the kind of fan that you want! The kind that actively goes out and find your show.

On a Hollywood agent having had a swim in waters full of sharks:

I think that's what they call professional courtesy.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.

Self-pity had always been her sincerest emotion...

Always know and remember that you are more than your physical body.

The Cross was the manifestation of Divine love without reserve or limit; but it was also the expression of man's unutterable malignity.

Robert Anderson

People here always want to grab a simple camera and a table light, get their cousin and shoot a movie. You can't say that's wrong, but it's not cinema.

Those magnificent men in their flying machines, or How I flew from London to Paris in 25 hours and 11 minutes.

Jack Davies (screenwriter)

War is a farmer's son from Kansas trying to kill a factory worker's son from Berlin, with neither of them knowing why.

Randall Wallace

We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me.
Says I, 'But Joe, you're ten years dead.'
'I never died,' says he.

Extending the language of film sometimes starts with just trying to show one true thing.

There's nothing like an airport for bringing you down to earth.

Richard Gordon (English author)

Bernie: Can you help me? I have lost my sense of direction.
Kermit: Have you tried Hare Krishna?

Here's the Remains of the Day lunchbox. Kids don't like eating at school, but if they have a Remains of the Day lunchbox they're a lot happier.

Christopher Guest