Screenwriter Quotes

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

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

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

The emergency room was a madhouse. The stormy holiday roads had yielded more than the statistical expectation of traffic accidents.

The birds fly in the wrong places and there are too many stars in the sky.

Anthony Horowitz

All my life I've wanted to see London. [...] I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die.

Sometimes you just gotta trust that your secret's been kept long enough.

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

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.

That explains a lot,' he said. 'I suppose it's also why we've never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed.

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.

Nothing that the law-makers or the law-breakers or the MCC or the Board of Control or any conferences or county committees or pressmen or captains or players can do to it or have done to it over the years - nothing can affect cricket's basic worth or irresistible attraction.

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.

Extending the language of film sometimes starts with just trying to show one true thing.

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.

It is phenomenal how fast a little toot of smack will take away the agony of withdrawal and most other kinds of pain. What it cannot take away it makes meaningless. You may still have a broken arm, but somehow it doesn't matter so much. The same is true for angst and anxiety. It cancels pain so hidden that you were unaware of its existence until it disappeared.

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

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Heroes, while it was cancelled last year for low ratings on the network, ironically was the number one downloaded show in the world that year above shows like Lost and 24 and that kind of thing. For a show like Heroes that had all of these illegal downloading, pirating, I wore that as a badge of honour. That's exactly the kind of fan that you want! The kind that actively goes out and find your show.

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

Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for.

Ethel Lina White

They call war an art, but it isn't. It largely consists in outwitting people, robbing widows and orphans, and inflicting suffering on the helpless for one's own ends - and that's not art: that's business.

Kenneth Roberts (author)

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

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.

Turned on the TV this morning. Had this shit on about living in a violent world. Showed all these foreign places foreigners live and all. I started thinking, man. Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the 'hood.

H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.