American Screenwriter Quotes

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

Bernie: Can you help me? I have lost my sense of direction.
Kermit: Have you tried Hare Krishna?

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.

More than a billion adults worldwide are now overweight - and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese. Childhood obesity is already epidemic in some areas and on the rise in others. Worldwide, an estimated 17.6 million children under five are said to be overweight.

Morgan Spurlock

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.

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

And the most dangerous place on earth— Is where you're safe.

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

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.

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 believe there is any finer mission on earth than just to make people laugh.

Roscoe Arbuckle

I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

We all need the waters of the Mercy River. Though they don't run deep, there's usually enough, just enough, for the extravagance of our lives.

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.

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

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!

Let's go again to Niag'ra,
This time we'll look at the Fall.
Let's leave our hut, Dear,
Get out of our rut, Dear,
Let's get away from it all.

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

Lie to me. Tell me all these years you've waited. Tell me.

Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.

Richard Matheson

Howard Beale is processed, instant God, and right now it looks like he might just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore.

Paddy Chayefsky

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)

His mane was like a crest, mounting, then falling low. His neck was long and slender, and arched to the small, savagely beautiful head. The head was that of the wildest of all wild creatures- a stallion born wild- and it was beautiful, savage, splendid. A stallion with a wonderful physical perfection that matched his savage, ruthless spirit.

Never apologize and never explain—it's a sign of weakness.

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