Screenwriter Quotes

“We should have stayed on the moon. We should have made moon the base, instead of building space stations, which are fragile and which fly apart.”

“Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”

“No person ever died that had a family.”

“[His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”

“That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.”

“Digression is the soul of wit.”

“All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.”

“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”

“"That's sad," said Montag, quietly, "because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know."”

“What do you do, go around trying everything once?' he asked. 'Sometimes twice.”

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.”

“From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.”

“Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.”

“We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe”

“Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating, by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer's make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road he wants to go. I would only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.”

“The local TV news is the greatest danger in your life. It's all crap.”

“You don't have to worry about the future, you don't worry about the past - you just explode.”

“Friendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don't have enough brains to have your good taste.”

“The whole concept of higher education is negated unless the sole criterion used to determine if students qualify is the grades they score on standardized tests. Education is purely an issue of learning - we can no longer afford to have it polluted by damn politics. Leave pollution up to the politicians”

“It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”

“When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.”

“So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.”

“You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do - and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time.”

“My favorite writers have been those who've said things well.”

“Creativity is a continual surprise.”