American Screenwriter Quotes

Woody Allen

Raymond Chandler

L. Frank Baum

Stanley Kubrick

John Steinbeck

Denzel Washington

Oliver Stone

Mortals seldom know how greatly they are influenced by fairies, knooks and ryls, who often put thoughts into their heads that only the wise little immortals could have conceived.

Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.

Raymond Chandler

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.

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.

If you find a way to write with open heart to Diary, a friend with Truth, no detail spared, your tome like Petrarch's works will contain the scattered fragments of your soul.

Robin Maxwell (author)

Real Men no longer drive Corvettes. Despite being able to squander gas with the best of them, even today's least enlightened Real Man finds the notion of a $17,000 plastic car with no trunk somewhat absurd.

Bruce Feirstein

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.

Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.

Richard Linklater

You're certainly a funny girl for anybody to meet who's just been up the Amazon for a year.

Preston Sturges

Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus, and it's hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy, and more than anything else in the world, you wanna get off. And the only reason in the world you don't get off is it's still fifty blocks from where you're going. Well, I can get off right now if I want to. Because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it's still the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. Whenever I've had enough, it's my stop. I've had enough.

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

Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the after-birth.It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.

There was laughter in the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.

George S. Kaufman

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

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.

Critics have never been able to discover a unifying theme in my films. For thatmatter, neither have I.

It is clear enough by now to most people that the camera never lies is a foolish saying. Yet it is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is.

We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a love affair in the end.

Lillian Hellman

You have watched the Titans walk the Earth … and you have kept stride. Perhaps you are more like them than you realize. You exist … to give hope.

There are some men who possess a quality which goes way beyond romantic or even sexual appeal, a quality which literally enslaves. It has very little to do with looks and nothing at all to do with youth, because there are some quite mature and unathletic specimens who have it. It's an expression in the eyes, an aura of being in control, and responsible, or something easy and powerful in the stance, or who knows.

Very well! he said. You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust! I'd never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. All right, I said uncertainly. But won't we be needing horses for that? Not horses, he replied, stepping away from his throne. Birds.

I always grieve for the poor souls who have to grind out a daily humorous column or a weekly piece.

As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something.

Look, it's moving. It's alive, it's alive, it's alive. It's moving. It's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive!