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.

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)

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.

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

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

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

Antonio Skarmeta

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

William Nicholson

I like the idea of stopping mid-sentence, like Graham Greene.

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

Lancey Howard speaking

Ring Lardner Jr.

When I heard I was up for it, obviously I wanted to win. It's really an honour. I love playing for my country.

Some people just wanted to blow it all to hell, animal, vegetable and mineral. They wanted a Vietnam they could fit into their car ashtrays.

Since ancient times, the philosophers' secret has always been this: we know that God does not exist, or, at least, if he does, he's utterly indifferent to our individual affairs--but we can't let the rabble know that; it's the fear of God, the threat of divine punishment and the promise of divine reward, that keeps in line those too unsophisticated to work out questions of morality on their own.

Robert J. Sawyer

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

I haven't had a single moment of terror since they told me [I was dying]. My only regret is to die four pages too soon. If I can finish, then I'm quite happy to go.

Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse.... I find Obama scary in a way that I had not done in 2008.

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.

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

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but truth is something that arises out of the relationship between language and the world. If I look at a picture alone, it tells me nothing. In the previous incarnation of this lecture, I was going to put a picture of the Titanic and the Lusitania up on the screen. They look very, very similar - four smokestacks. They look almost identical. You look at either picture, true or false? Neither. Put a caption at the bottom of one of them, that changes everything. If you put in the caption, "This is the Lusitania," and the picture is a picture of the Lusitania, then the caption is true. However, the picture itself is neither true nor false. It's just a picture.

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 50s face was angry, the 60s face was well-fed, the 70s face was foxy. Perhaps it was the right expression: there was a lot to be wary about.

Keith Waterhouse

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

Lying became part of my life. I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something

Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages?... I guess it's because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears – Chaucer's, Boccaccio's, Henry Knighton's, Thomas Walsingham's, Froissart's, Jean Creton's... writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today. We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves.