Screenwriter Quotes

“We are anthill men upon an anthill world.”

“A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.”

“There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!”

“The very first experiments with building rockets and firing them off were carried out by students at Cal Tech in 1937, '38 and '39. And later these people put together these jet propulsion labs in Pasadena and wound up sending aircraft and spacecraft to the moon. So it all began very primitively with love.”

“When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”

“Most of my short stories are fantasy.”

“Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.”

“The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.”

“That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”

“To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root - first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you've got the future secured.”

“The merry-go-round was running, yes, but... It was running backward. The small calliope inside the carousel machinery rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choked and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes.”

“I don't need to be vindicated, and I don't want attention.”

“Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.”

“Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.”

“The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.”

“Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores.”

“Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.”

“There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You've got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.”

“Fame and money are gifts given to us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths.”

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.”

“I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.”

“The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow”

“Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”

“How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.”