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

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me.
Says I, 'But Joe, you're ten years dead.'
'I never died,' says he.

People here always want to grab a simple camera and a table light, get their cousin and shoot a movie. You can't say that's wrong, but it's not cinema.

What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.

William Saroyan

There was laughter in the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.

George S. Kaufman

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.

I've had this feeling ever since I graduated. This kind of compulsion that I have to be rude all the time.... It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.

Calder Willingham

With a few exceptions, Fellini's films have failure and despair running through them: Life continues, but I can't imagine 'Felliniesque' as an exclusively uplifting adjective. Fellini's best films are the ones that distill this essence — the paradoxical quality of melancholic ecstasy, a surreal, bittersweet vitality — to perfection.

Damian Pettigrew

He had gone to several universities... and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness.

Edward Lewis Wallant

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.

The Great Actor always must act. … Every last second of his life must be pose and posture.

Lionel Barrymore

And one's passions are so random and unreliable - cricket scores one minute, Swinburne the next.

Julian Mitchell

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.

Michael Cunningham

Unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare.

Lawrence Wright

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

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.