20th-century Screenwriter Quotes

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

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

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

Jack Davies (screenwriter)

A man must make of his life a ladder that he never ceases to climb — if you're not rising, you are slipping down the rungs, my friend.

Don't drink alone, Scarlett. People always find out and it ruins your reputation.

There are moments in your life when you see yourself through someone else's eyes, when your only hope of believing you're capable of doing something is because someone else believes it for you.

He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That's right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that's never happened before.

External freedom has probably never existed, but neither have I ever known anyone who knew inner freedom.

Marlen Haushofer

I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, engaged, powerful people, are busy doing.

I don't understand it completely … but she adores me. She thinks I'm funny. … My attitude towards communication has always been: it's a slippery slope, because you start communicating, the next thing you know you're going to be talking to each other, the next thing you know you're going to be feeling things, and then you'll be living your life and I want no part of that. … So I tried to avoid that stuff, but she forces it upon me.

William H. Macy

Bankers, nepotists, contracts and talkies: on four fingers one may count the leeches which have sucked a young and vigorous industry into paresis.

Often, the truly great and valuable lessons we learn in life are learned through pain. That's why they call it "growing pains." It's all about yin and yang. And that's not something you order off column A at your local Chinese restaurant.

There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.

Some day, when things are tough, maybe you can ask the boys to go in there and win just one for the Gipper!

The film-director is not a creator but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.

The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.

People don't change, they just have momentary steps outside of their true character

All my people sing of are memories. And so I will remember this death. It will burden me as it does not burden my fellow students - I must not let that change. I must not become like them. I'll remember that every sin, every death, every sacrifice, is for freedom.

Did people ever stop changing? They surprised you with fresh pain. Sometimes they surprised you with happiness, but the pain was the sharper surprise. There was no way to protect yourself from it. People could always change and always hurt you. Of course it went in the other direction too, you could hurt them when you didn't intend it and that too was out of your control.

I've had this feeling ever since I graduated. This kind of compulsion that I have to be rude all the time.... It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.

Calder Willingham

It's art. It's commerce. It's heartbreaking and it's fun. It's a great way to live.

It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers, that you've felt this autumn-feeling before and you'll probably get to feel it again, but one day you won't anymore, because you'll be dead.

Sarah Dunn (author)

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.

There can only be one winner, folks, but isn't that the American way?

Indecisiveness and procrastination are the chosen ways of life for most people. They follow the course of least resistance, which is to do nothing. This provides a security blanket of never being wrong, never making mistakes, never being disappointed and never failing. But they will also never succeed.