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

We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.

I've never been one for late nights, which is why I have always preferred making films to theatre. A play takes over your life: you start to feel sick at lunchtime and by mid-afternoon you're wishing for a bomb scare so the whole thing will be called off. Of course, if the evening goes well and you get the applause then it's wonderful. We're a strange bunch, we actors.

His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

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

We all need the waters of the Mercy River. Though they don't run deep, there's usually enough, just enough, for the extravagance of our lives.

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Hawai'i has often been called a melting pot, but I think of it more as a 'mixed plate'—a scoop of rice with gravy, a scoop of macaroni salad, a piece of mahi-mahi, and a side of kimchi. Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely 'local' cuisine. This is also, I believe, what America is at its best—a whole greater than the sum of it's parts.

I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre.

Twenty miles on, we have spotted a roadside sign: 'CHAINSAW CARVED MUSHROOMS'. Troubles promptly forgotten, Stuart falls to gawping at the road ahead. What could it all be about? 'As one victim to another,' his body language seems to marvel, 'What's a mushroom done to deserve that kind of abuse?' Not even in the worst days of street-fighting did he ever experience ill-treatment on this scale.

Alexander Masters

Are you by any chance acquainted with the words 'steel toe'? Or do the words 'permanent dent' mean anything to you?" My locker door is not intimidated. "My grandfather was a vault at Fort Knox, and if you try to dent me with a kick you will only tear some ligament that will never mend.

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

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

One shouldn't allow oneself to be intimidated by something that can be picked up and tucked under one's arm.

She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge is torture.

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.

Editing is not merely a method of the junction of separate scenes or pieces, but is a method that controls the 'psychological guidance' of the spectator.

Vsevolod Pudovkin

Now, your Honor; in much the same way that there are laws governing our society, there are also laws governing chance, and these are called the laws of probability, and it is against these that we must examine the use of an identical division number.