Screenwriter Quotes

You're good, kid, but as long as I'm around, you're only second best.
Lancey Howard speaking

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

Great parts of our economy are directly dependent upon women having a weak self-concept. A multi-billion dollar fashion-cosmetic industry testifies to the validity of this approach. A woman who does not know who she is can be sold anything.

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

Robert McKee
Robert McKee
The heart that is to be filled to the brim with holy joy must be held still.

George Seaton
George Seaton
Photography is to the layman perhaps the most enticing art. As a buff and a follower, at a respectful distance, I find myself like others, having the heart of a Steiglitz with hands that sometimes seem impeded by boxing gloves. What is exasperating is that one can feel closer to managing the skills of photography than most other arts, and yet be a long hop, skip and delusional way from it.

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

Canada is a country so square that even the female impersonators are women.

Flo: I've never been so insulted in my life.
Hackenbush: Well, it's early yet.

Boston is one of the few American cities that regrets the past... Boston's like England. Up to its ears in yellowing photographs.

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

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

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.

Helene Hanff
Helene Hanff
Nobody comes to Minnesota to take their clothes off, at least as far as I know.

Diablo Cody
Diablo Cody
It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers, that you've felt this autumn-feeling before and you'll probably get to feel it again, but one day you won't anymore, because you'll be dead.

Bernie: Can you help me? I have lost my sense of direction.
Kermit: Have you tried Hare Krishna?

There are no available men in their thirties in New York. Giuliani had them removed along with the homeless.

To Christopher Isherwood who had caught a bad cold and was saying apologetically that he should have cancelled their meeting:
My dear Christopher, any cold of yours is a cold of mine.

There are few more frustrating things in life than being told something that you already know but cannot admit to knowing.

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.

David Klass
David Klass
Despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.

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.

Peter Benchley
Peter Benchley
A gem of a short film has a sense of pure joy in animation that is different from anything you see in a feature film.

John Lasseter
John Lasseter
Joe Gillis: You used to be in pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

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