Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've never flown a kite.
You're a writer. Make it up.
Fiction novels, that's my game.
I'm just not a natural teacher.
I like having my own story remain my story.
The secret to winning a woman is calculated neglect.
the lonliest sound in the world is other people making love.
Just the notion of falling for someone, that involves weakness.
My favorite food in the world is hard shell crabs from Maryland.
Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.
I was a huge fantasy geek growing up. I was the dungeon master in my D&D game.
Everyone knew this was the episode that was going to make or break the season.
Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.
If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.
You don't like the girl. You don't know what color eyes she has, you don't like her.
This is good, life must continue, we are fighting barbarians, but we must remain human.
'Breaking Bad.' Because it's the best American narrative fiction of the last ten years.
I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.
There's never been a fantasy movie of the epic battle of good versus evil that ended with evil winning.
To shoot a decent fight, you need to cover all the different angles, and it ends up eating a lot of days.
A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.
Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.
Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.
With the movies, people are not going to wait around. The deadline is a deadline. In publishing it's more a polite suggestion.
Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?
We have a 'bad movie' club, and we go to whatever dumb movie is playing in the local theater, then go and have some beers and dinner.
Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.
But in a 24-hour day, the 25th hour is also the impossible hour, an hour that doesn't exist, that can only be created by the imagination.
I think, in a weird way, the reason I was drawn to screenwriting and the reason I really love doing it is because I love writing dialogue.
I don't type my sentences on an arena's pitch, surrounded by thousands of cheering or booing fans - I don't feel pressure to please a crowd.
I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover.
Sometimes I get jealous when I'm reading a great book by a younger writer. But 'White Tiger' is so good, I almost forgot to hate Aravind Adiga.
With screenplays, it's all about being as concise as possible. If you have a scene that's set in a bar, you just have to write, 'Interior: Bar.'
Hollywood screenwriters tend to have the longevity of NFL running backs. So the truth is no one can put more pressure on us than we put on ourselves.
I was half asleep but I smiled. In spite of all his irritating qualities, I couldn't help liking a man who despised a fictional character with such passion.
It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success.
Contrary to popular belief, the experience of terror does not make you braver. Perhaps though, it is easier to hide your fear when you're afraid all the time.
McCullers is one of those rare writers who remembers what childhood is like. Not incidents, which anyone can recall, but states of mind, which are so difficult to recreate.
'The 25th Hour' came out of the decision - a really very conscious decision - that I needed a story set within a compressed time frame because that would help focus the story.
The longer you work in this business [movie], the more you start to be able to see the carpentry. You can see where things are going, and it's harder to surprise you, as a reader
If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.
Some of my happiest childhood memories are going to the movies with my dad and seeing whatever was out that week. In 1977, when I was 7, it was 'Star Wars.' That was a life-changer.
Iwan Rheon is a great actor, and he's going to go on to a long brilliant career. And most of the characters he'll play will not be evil. He's not one of those who can only play a bad guy.
I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.
Every time something bad happens, like we lose a day because of weather or an actor gets injured or anything else happens, the schedule has to change. It's the most challenging Tetris puzzle.
'Game Of Thrones' was too big a canvas for a movie, but 'Dirty White Boys' is like a great old Western: there's so much compression, and it's so pressurized, it demands to be told in one sitting.
The reality is, 'Game of Thrones' has been a successful show for HBO, which has put us in a position to come and pitch another show and get them excited about it. And that's what helped get us here.
There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.
I don't like extremely long movies. I tend to get a bit impatient. There are definitely exceptions, like 'Lawrence of Arabia,' but for the most part, I feel that movies should usually be shorter and not longer.
The eternal challenge for screenwriter adapters is figuring out how to make something work on screen, when so much of what made it work in the book were the thoughts of the character, and obviously wanting to avoid voiceover.