American Screenwriter Quotes

Only by constantly exposing myself to someone better than I have I been able to improve.

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.

Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multiracial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world.

I knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.

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

I've always been more afraid of being left alone or left out than of things that go bump in the night.

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.

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

George S. Kaufman

We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all.

The goal was just to finish the movie and get it out in a few theaters. To think that decades later people would still be thinking and talking about it, I could have never imagined.

There is art in taking time to appreciate the clean wash of the mind's silence.

Always know and remember that you are more than your physical body.

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.

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.

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.

It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.

The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.

I gotta tell you, I am loving this yada yada thing. I can gloss over my whole life story.

The Cross was the manifestation of Divine love without reserve or limit; but it was also the expression of man's unutterable malignity.

Robert Anderson

She is a phenomenon of nature, like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. You can't talk to it. It can't talk to you. All you can do is stand back and be awed by it.

Of Marilyn Monroe

Nunnally Johnson

I've had this feeling ever since I graduated. This kind of compulsion that I have to be rude all the time.... It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.

Calder Willingham

Pirate: I'm gonna teach you the meaning of pain.
Elizabeth: You like pain? Try wearing a corset.

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!

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.

It was a tough break. Parry was innocent. On top of that he was a decent sort of guy who never bothered people and wanted to lead a quiet life. But there was too much on the other side and on his side of it there was practically nothing. The judge handed him a life sentence and he was taken to San Quentin.