American Screenwriter Quotes

Woody Allen

Raymond Chandler

L. Frank Baum

Stanley Kubrick

John Steinbeck

Denzel Washington

Tim Burton

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.

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.

I don't believe there is any finer mission on earth than just to make people laugh.

Roscoe Arbuckle

As life is larger than man, so is life wiser than we are. As evolution has made us possible, so will evolution sit in final judgment. As natural selection declared us in, so natural selection should our hubris overcome us... declare us out.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.

Peter S. Beagle

A new space race has begun, and most Americans are not even aware of it. This race is not [about] political prestige or military power. This new race involves the whole human species in a contest against time.

There was a great director who directed a picture that I wrote who barred me from the set—quite appropriately—and said, I'm sorry, Jim. When you're directing, you don't need to know everything. You need the illusion that you do. And, you know, and I WOULD be there—behind him trying to signal the actors in, you know, in a way I wasn't even aware of.

James L. Brooks

What they learned [...] was to speak on the phones in such a way that your hearer couldn't help but understand what you meant, and in such a way that you, speaking, had no choice but to express what you meant, they learned to make speech — transparent, like glass, so that through the words the face is seen truly.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it.

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.

It's always a shock to the people who run studios when a movie that is for women is a hit. They have an infinite capacity to be shocked.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

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

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!

Lying became part of my life. I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something

We have this sacred cow in our society that what the majority of people want is rightbut is it? Our populace can't really be informed, not the majority of themmost people vote the way they have been manipulated and by the way they have responded to that manipulationthey are working out their own patterns of wishful thinking on the social environment in which they live.

Port Talbot is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, it's just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like 'Brazil.' The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray.

Pay minimum wage, you get minimum work. Nobody seems to get that.

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.)

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

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.

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

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.