Screenwriter Quotes

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

George S. Kaufman

When you go down a dark alley and you feel that tingling across the back of your neck, that's not just a bad feeling, that's a biological gift from God - the Gift of Fear...when you ignore that gift - when you go down the dark alley and say, Y'know, I'm sure it'll be okay - that's when you find real pain.

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

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

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.

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

Michael Cunningham

People aren't evil and people aren't good. They live how they can one day at a time. They come out of dust they go back to dust, dusty feet, no wings, and whose fault is that?

Caryl Churchill

Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?

Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.

The goal was just to finish the movie and get it out in a few theaters. To think that decades later people would still be thinking and talking about it, I could have never imagined.

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

The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea.

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.

Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multiracial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world.

I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, engaged, powerful people, are busy doing.

A name with a gently exotic ring to it, like birdsong, like a grain of sand in the far-off Gobi Desert or the northern steppes, whipped up by the wind, carried by storms, swirling through the sky, travelling, crossing whole countries without knowing quite how, and ending up in the crook of my ear.

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

William Boyd (writer)

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

Because one morning as the sun was coming up I told myself that I had to swallow up all of the fear and garbage around me, and once it was inside me I had to transform it all into candy. Becuase I know you will be able to love me for it.

Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

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

Lawrence Wright

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

Roberto Rossellini

Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.