Film Screenwriting

Quotes & Thinkers in Film Screenwriting

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🇺🇸Cormac McCarthy

Literature

1933–2023

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there."

"...when you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through."

"P.S. Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Thompkinson, who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious Creature!"

"But that is what life is like, uncertain, screwed at times but still fun."

"The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years."

"It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope."

"When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then — he needn't hope to find himself again."

"It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls. Not to the boys — who were all like that anyway. The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose."

"When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London's Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: "Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?"

"Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable."

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing."

"When all the hope is gone, there is no reason for pessimism."

"I am legitimately Scottish. I can officially say — yes. Yeah, I am from Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland."

"That's what makes his story so impossible, David. Because he's told me the truth."

10 quotes

🇺🇸Jordan Vogt-Roberts

"On December 22, 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have set my sights on the millennium and a world where we are all equal."

"A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters."

"Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are."

"Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all."

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."

"I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with."

"Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."

"Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have."

"Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can."

"John O'Hara was a terrible bore as a young man—always looking for a fight, and making sure he never found one."

"That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears."

"Dream Magic, a short a film about Alanis Obomsawin created for her Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement"

"I had the taste of the alcohol since I was 11 … It allowed me to be clever, charming and to behave outrageously. Acting also allowed me not to be me. So I could indulge every fantasy in this paradise of America."

"Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs."

"Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze."

"He smiled his irresistible smile, but Dora found it highly resistible."

"A genius is just a mentally ill person with an audience."

"When a man knows what he is talking about, his voice crackles with authority."

"All the movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds."

43 quotes