20th-century Screenwriter Quotes

Turned on the TV this morning. Had this shit on about living in a violent world. Showed all these foreign places foreigners live and all. I started thinking, man. Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the 'hood.

Great parts of our economy are directly dependent upon women having a weak self-concept. A multi-billion dollar fashion-cosmetic industry testifies to the validity of this approach. A woman who does not know who she is can be sold anything.

Gabrielle Burton

Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people who present them.

In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

In the United States, we can talk about ISIS, but we can't talk about Palestine.

And should I not, had I but known, have flung the machine this way and that, once more to feel it live under my hand, have sported in the sky and laughed and sung, knowing that never after should I feel so free, so sure in hazard, so secure, riding the daylight in the pride of youth? No more horizons wider than Hope! No more the franchise of the sky, the freedom of the blue! No more! Farewell to wings! Down to the little earth!

Cecil Arthur Lewis

Nothing looks more foolish than tradition to those who have none.

A gem of a short film has a sense of pure joy in animation that is different from anything you see in a feature film.

You seldom listen to me, and when you do you don't hear, and when you do hear you hear wrong, and even when you hear right you change it so fast that it's never the same.

Marjorie Kellogg

Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?

To make mistakes is natural, but to go to one's grave without having understood them is to make life a pointless exercise.

It's not the child's responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It's the parent's responsibility to learn who the child is.

Scuba diving, from the beginning, had an air of dangerous allure. Every landlocked schoolboy knew of its intriguing hazards: the bends, which caused a diver's veins to fizz with carbonated blood until he died a ghastly, percolating death; and rapture of the deep, which took away his reason, filled his heart with false contentment, and drew him down into the ocean gloom.

Stephen Harrigan

Photography is to the layman perhaps the most enticing art. As a buff and a follower, at a respectful distance, I find myself like others, having the heart of a Steiglitz with hands that sometimes seem impeded by boxing gloves. What is exasperating is that one can feel closer to managing the skills of photography than most other arts, and yet be a long hop, skip and delusional way from it.

In January 1912 Leonard proposed marriage. She was unable to answer directly and he pressed further in a passionate letter: 'It isn't, really it isn't, merely because you are so beautiful - though of course that is a large reason & so it should be - that I love you: it is your mind & your character - I have never known anyone like you in that - won't you believe me?'

To lose a lover or even a husband or two during the course of one's life can be vexing. But to lose one's teeth is a catastrophe.

Sometimes you just gotta trust that your secret's been kept long enough.

For photography to be an art involves reformulating notions of art, rejecting both material and formal purism and also the separation of art from commerce as distinct semiotic practices that never interlock.

A man who is not touched by the earthy lyricism of hot pastrami, the pungent fantasy of corned beef, pickles, frankfurters, the great lusty impertinence of good mustard is a man of stone and without heart.

No one will ever make your movie. They will only make their movie.

Millard Kaufman

At the end, one didn't remember life as a whole but as just a string of moments.

There are few more frustrating things in life than being told something that you already know but cannot admit to knowing.

Helen Cresswell

You have this character who is sort of receding inside himself. And the music within the film tells us what he can't. In the beginning it starts out very, very small. Once you get to that third story, the music [the actual soundtrack] starts to get a lot more expressive and sensual.

There is something missing in black America, and symptoms of the illness are in its music.

People don't so much believe in God as that they choose not to believe in nothing.

Rafael Yglesias