American Screenwriter Quotes

Woody Allen

Raymond Chandler

L. Frank Baum

Stanley Kubrick

John Steinbeck

Denzel Washington

Tim Burton

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.

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.

Delaware has fought and bucked, hated, reviled, admired and fawned upon, ignored and courted the Du Ponts, but in the end, it has invariably bowed to Du Pont's benevolent paternalism.

James Warner Bellah

Some people just wanted to blow it all to hell, animal, vegetable and mineral. They wanted a Vietnam they could fit into their car ashtrays.

The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.

Cormac McCarthy

If you are inclined to leave your character solitary for any considerable length of time, better question yourself. Fiction is association, not withdrawal.

A. B. Guthrie Jr.

To Christopher Isherwood who had caught a bad cold and was saying apologetically that he should have cancelled their meeting:

My dear Christopher, any cold of yours is a cold of mine.

A question I've thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.

Gabrielle Zevin

The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea.

All my life I've wanted to see London. [...] I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die.

Out under the moon and the stars, alone with his son that eighth night, Omoro completed the naming ritual. Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, "Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee. " (Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.)

With such exquisite play-acting, you make this very room a theater.

It's an accepted fact that all writers are crazy, even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

I like to say I don't believe in mystics. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in destiny or kismet. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in anything. But I believe in the possibility of everything.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

One day, when I am a braver man, I will tell her these things, and then I will look her in the eye tell her I love her and ask her to be only mine. But until that day, we're just friends.

I had never really done something that was more of a horror film, and its funny, because those are the kind of movies that I like probably more than any other genre. The script had images in it that I liked.

There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire.

You can never totally hate someone who sang you to sleep like that, can you? Who calmed you down and eased your fears. You can feel angry and betrayed, but some part of you will always love them for being there on those scary nights, for giving you a place to run to where your nightmares couldn't follow, the one place where you could descend finally into slumber knowing, at least for the time being, that you were completely safe.

Jonathan Tropper

I'm a social writer in the sense that I want to record, but not in the sense of trying to change people's minds.

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.

She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret. Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

You go for a man hard enough and fast enough, he don't have time to think about how many's with him; he thinks about himself, and how he might get clear of that wrath that's about to set down on him.