Director Quotes

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a film-maker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

We're not gay!
Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Good-looking people, they got no spine; their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we're smarter.... The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.

Letting go of someone we love is the hardest thing we will ever do. Some people never surrender to love for the fear of being hurt. But to not have loved, to not have felt the immense joy it brings, would have been a far worse kind of death.

One's lifework... grows with the working and the living. Do it as if your life depended on it, and the first thing you know, you'll have made a life of it.

Theresa Helburn

Films don't cause violence, people do. Violence defines our existence. To shield oneself is more dangerous than trying to reflect it.

Kathryn Bigelow

Come to think of it, Pasadena's as good a place to die as any.

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one's own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery—much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China.

I'm sort of a nervous person with the camera, so I will just shoot arbitrarily until I can focus and compose something, and then I make a shot. So generally, in [the] proof sheets, there are only three or four really concentrated efforts to take a photograph. It's not like a professional kind of person who sets it up so every photograph looks really cool.

I don't 'ave a future. Nobody 'as a future. The party's over. Take a look around you, man. It's all breakin' up.

When God makes a mistake, they call it nature.

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline: at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.

It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression - to express reality through reality...

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness.

I think my mother was like a small company which, because things are not ship-shape, keeps two sets of books, one for the auditors and then there's the other one.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Here's the first major lesson: Writing is not an activity. It's not something you sit down at the keyboard, and just start doing. That's called 'typing.' Typing is an activity... Writing is a process. And if you start thinking of it as a process, life gets so much easier.

We now remain, at least on paper, one of the last few countries in the world, where if you don't die successfully, you'll go to jail for attempting.

The intention of not only the screenwriter, but also the entire production staff, was to focus on how people would react if a creature such as Godzilla really did appear. What would the politicians do? How about the scientists? How would the military handle the situation? Given this, it was inevitable that the film would seem at least somewhat like a documentary.

I learned long ago to accept the fact that not everything I create will see the light of day.

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

Melissa Gilbert

The history of each and every territory is written in the blood of those who died trying to fulfill the aspirations of their ambitious leaders.

If you expect nothing, you can never be disappointed. Apart from a few starry-eyed poets or monks living on a mountaintop somewhere, however, we all have expectations. We not only have them, we need them. They fuel our dreams, our hopes, and our lives like some super-caffeinated energy drink.

There are some things which cannot be learned, though they can be studied. Among them are the laws of art—and the lawlessness of it, as well.

Josef von Sternberg

A gym for the soul is a place where personal investment is required and the return is real.

Listen. This will probably be the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life. Everything in your body will tell you to let go, but you have to hold on. You have to hold on, Maddy, no matter what. No matter how badly it hurts. You can never, never let go. Can you do that for me?