Screenwriter Quotes

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.

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

Antonio Skarmeta

Responsibility without power, the fate of the secretary through the ages.

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

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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.

I burned my candle at both ends, And now have neither foes nor friends.

Samuel Hoffenstein

The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.

Our mouths are full of such words as freedom, but what does it really mean? Does it not perhaps mean being totally alone, living in a total vacuum?

Krzysztof Kieślowski

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

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

As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something.

There is no worse flaw in man's character than that of wanting to belong.

David Adams Richards

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.

There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature.

Charles Eastman

You have no idea the power generated each time somebody is told a story. When a conscious, sentient mind willingly ignores what is real, what is fact, and instead chooses to invest in people and places that never existed...It's magnificent.

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.

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

Lionel Barrymore

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

There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire.

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

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.

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

When a doting person gets down on all fours and plays with the dog's rubber mouse, it only confuses the puppy and gives him a sense of insecurity. He gets the impression that the world is unstable and wonders whether he is supposed to walk on his hind legs and smoke cigars.

Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride,
Friendship without envy, or beauty without vanity?

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

George S. Kaufman