American Screenwriter Quotes

Joe Gillis: You used to be in pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

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

People come to Washington believing it's the centre of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that's not connected to the engine.

Greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works.

A bug is nothing! A bug does not exist. The word has no meaning. It's only used out of ignorance or malice. You know what a bug is? A bug is a colloquialism which has no basis in reality. Insects include a wide variety of living creatures that fly and crawl, but none of them can be called a bug!

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

Jules Furthman
Jules Furthman
The key to a woman's heart is an unexpected gift at an unexpected time.

I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find that you're not, I hope you find the strength to start all over again.

You finally, really did it—you maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!

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

John Huston
John Huston
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

Garson Kanin
Garson Kanin
And do not be paralyzed. It is better to move than to be unable to move, because you fear loss so much: loss of order, loss of security, loss of predictability.

The director of a film is treated by his staff the way a group of passengers would treat a psychotic ship's captain during a typhoon: namely, with respect and apprehension.

The Internet has come to resemble an enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor, and a continuous stream of new books being added helter-skelter to the piles.

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

Under the attentiveness was fear, and something else. Anger, hate—the instinctive rejection of an intolerable truth.

It's as though some poor devil were to set out for a large dinner party with the knowledge that the following morning he would be hearing exactly what each of the other guests thought of him.

Cornelia Otis Skinner
Cornelia Otis Skinner
The world is divided up into two kinds of people - those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't.

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

William Goldman
William Goldman
The most important thing about a TV set is to get it back against something and not out in the middle of a room where it's like a somber fellow making electronic judgments on you.

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.

Peter Benchley
Peter Benchley
Nobody comes to Minnesota to take their clothes off, at least as far as I know.

Diablo Cody
Diablo Cody
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.

Here's the Remains of the Day lunchbox. Kids don't like eating at school, but if they have a Remains of the Day lunchbox they're a lot happier.

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.