Screenwriter Quotes

Woody Allen

Raymond Chandler

L. Frank Baum

Ingmar Bergman

Stanley Kubrick

John Steinbeck

Roald Dahl

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.

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.

Jacques Prévert

There comes a point in many people's lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.

Brian Moore (novelist)

You just threw cheese at Sam & Mark. Don't you think they've suffered enough?!

The struggle for life is not only the material and economic one. Comfort is no protection from anxiety.

Michelangelo Antonioni

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.

Torture injures everyone who comes into contact with it and corrodes the country that abides it.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

His face was a frame of strong brutal bones, so hard, the set of his jaw so aggressive, that it brought to mind Teuton warriors, shouts, winging of axes, berserk.

Alexander Baron

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

Peter S. Beagle

People ask what are my intentions with my films - my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer...

The core idea was to be as realistic as possible and we wanted people to identify with the characters.

I liked movies so much that they became an obsession. I am still trying to kick the habit.

Christoffer Boe

I totally regret as a German what happened at this point of history. But when people ask me are you, as a German, feel responsible for the Holocaust? No, because I'm born 1965 and it would be completely un-logical to say I'm responsible, but as a country we are responsible.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human

I have come to believe that the best kind of walk, or journey, is the one in which you have no particular destination when you set out.

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.

Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don't know how awful it is unti you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.

Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.

Russell T Davies