Screenwriter Quotes

Woody Allen

Raymond Chandler

L. Frank Baum

Stanley Kubrick

John Steinbeck

Roald Dahl

Astrid Lindgren

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.

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.

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)

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

Jacques Prévert

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.

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

Publishing is no longer simply a matter of picking worthy manuscripts and putting them on offer. It is now as important to market books properly, to work with the bookstore chains to getterms, co-op advertising, and the like. The difficulty is that publishers who can market are most often not the publishers with worthy lists.

Olivia Goldsmith

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

The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.

William Nicholson

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

You're good, kid, but as long as I'm around, you're only second best.

Lancey Howard speaking

Ring Lardner Jr.

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

I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.

Flo: I've never been so insulted in my life.
Hackenbush: Well, it's early yet.

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

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.

Marshall Brickman

Tell Papa I admire him but from now on I plan to admire him from as far away as I can get.

All men who first touch with words go much further afterwards with their hands.

Antonio Skarmeta

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.

There are no available men in their thirties in New York. Giuliani had them removed along with the homeless.

Michael Patrick King

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.

Well, one thing you can say for masturbation... you certainly don't have to look your best.

I think for me anyway, the most successful horror movies that work are the ones that can create characters who you care about and that have characteristics that resonate with you and I think that is highly important, because if you can create characters that are likeable and people you can relate to, to me it makes the scares that much more scarier.

I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.

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