51 quotes found
"Now the sun touched the horizon and the man reined in his horse tiredly, glad that the time for prayer had come."
"Changi became my university instead of my prison. … Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life — the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving."
"I can transport matter — anything — at the speed of light, perfectly. Of course this is only a crude beginning, but I've stumbled on the most important discovery since man sawed off the end of a tree trunk and found the wheel. The disintegrator-integrator will change life as we know it. Think what it means. Anything, even humans, will go through one of these devices. No need for cars or railways or airplanes, even spaceships. We'll set up matter-receiving stations throughout the world, and later the universe. There'll never be famine. Surpluses can be sent instantaneously at almost no cost, anywhere. Humanity need never want or fear again. I'm a very fortunate man, Hélène."
"God gives us intelligence to uncover the wonders of nature. Without the gift, nothing is possible."
"I get so scared sometimes. The suddenness of our age! Electronics, rockets, earth satellites, supersonic flight, and now this. It's not so much who invents them. It's the fact they exist. … Everything's going so fast, I'm just not ready to take it all in. It's, it's all so quick"
"The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox."
"The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world — and the most dangerous."
"Help! Help me! Please help me! Help me!"
"For Those Who Were There And Are Not. For Those Who Were There And Are For Him. But Most, For Her."
"Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon. Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls. Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men. ... These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived."
"I'm going to get that bloody bastard if I die in the attempt."
"Grey was not alone in his hatred. The whole of Changi hated King. They hated him for his muscular body, the clear glow in his blue eyes. In the twilight world of the half alive there were no fat or well-built or round or smooth or fair-built or thick-built men. There were only faces dominated by eyes and set on bodies that were skin over sinews and bones. No difference between them but age and face and height. And in all this world, only the King ate like a man, smoked like a man, slept like a man, dreamed like a man and looked like a man."
"When you have an enemy it is wise to know his ways. The King knew as much about Grey as any man could know about another."
"All his life he had heard legends told among pilots and sailormen about the incredible riches of Portugal's secret empire in the East, how they had by now converted the heathens to Catholicism and so held them in bondage, where gold was as cheap as pig iron, and emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires as plentiful as pebbles on a beach. If the Catholic part's true, he told himself, perhaps the rest is too."
"To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline — training — is about."
"There are no "mitigating circumstances" when it comes to rebellion against a sovereign lord."
"What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?"
"First she studied her husband's flower arrangement. He had chosen the blossom of a single white wild rose and put a single pearl of water on the green leaf, and set it on red stones. Autumn is coming, he was suggesting with the flower, talking through the flower, do not weep for the time of fall, the time of dying when the earth begins to sleep; enjoy the time of beginning again and experience the glorious cool of the autumn air on this summer evening...soon the tear will vanish and the rose, only the stones will remain — soon you and I will vanish and only the stones will remain."
"Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life."
"So much wealth and so much power, Armstrong thought, yet with a little luck, we can bring you down like Humpty-Dumpty..."
"Changi changed everyone, changed values permanently. For instance, it gave you a dullness about death — we saw too much of it to have the same sort of meaning to outsiders, to normal people. We are a generation of dinosaurs, we the few who survived. I suppose anyone who goes to war, any war, sees life with different eyes if they end up in one piece." What did you see?" "A lot of bull that's worshipped as the be-all and end-all of existence. So much of 'normal, civilized' life is bull that you can't imagine. … What frightens you, doesn't frighten me, what frightens me, you'd laugh at."
"Just a moment, children — what does "pledge" mean?"
"Your old teacher never explained anything to you? I don't think that was very good. Not to explain. You can always ask me anything. That's what a real teacher should do."
"It is a very pretty flag. … I wish I could have a piece of it. I know! If it's so important, I think we should all have a piece of it. Don't you? … Now we should decide — who should be allowed to cut the first piece off!"
"I want a star!"
"Your daddy had to go back to school a little. He had some strange thoughts — and he wanted other grown-ups to believe them. It's not right for others to believe wrong thoughts, is it?"
"Perhaps my mommy should go back to school. Perhaps she should."
"God bless mommy and daddy, and please can we have some candy."
"Maybe we didn't pray hard enough. Perhaps we should kneel down like is done in church. Perhaps were using the wrong name. Instead of God, let's say "Our Leader." Let's pray to our leader for candy! Let's pray extra specially hard, and don't open your eyes until I say."
"I'm going to pray to our leader every time!"
"I put the candy on the desk. So you know, it doesn't matter who you shut your eyes and pray to — to God, or anyone, even our leader — no one will ever give you anything. Only another human being … only I, or someone like me, can give you things. Praying to God or anyone for something is a waste of time."
"Because Johnny was especially clever I think we should make him monitor for the whole week. Don't you?"
"I'm going to work hard not to have any wrong thoughts!"
"I asked all kinds of people of every age, "You know the 'I pledge allegiance…'" but before I could finish, at once they would all parrot it, the words almost always equally blurred. In every case discovered that not one teacher, ever — or anyone — had ever explained the words to any one of them. Everyone just had to learn it to say it. The Children's Story came into being that day. It was then that I realized how completely vulnerable my child's mind was — any mind for that matter — under controlled circumstances. Normally I write and rewrite and re-rewrite, but this story came quickly — almost by itself. Barely three words were changed. It pleases me greatly because it keeps asking me questions … Questions like what's the use of "I pledge allegiance" without understanding? Like why is it so easy to divert thoughts and implant others? Like what is freedom and why is it so hard to explain? The Children's Story keeps asking me all sorts of questions I cannot answer. Perhaps you can — then your children will…"
"I was a teenager when that [referring to WW2] started and of course wars are fought by teenagers. Do you realize that? They really should be fought by the politicians and the old people who start these wars."
"Changi for me — of course it's easy to be wise after the event, and to discuss it cleverly after the event — was about as near as you can get to being dead and still be alive."
"I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one. … In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money. … the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it."
"All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they're any good, the ending is a beginning."
"one of my favorite books-and I emphasize the word book here because I'm not talking about the movie-is The Godfather...Oh, yes, a book like Shogun."
"Although historians sometimes disputed the historical accuracy of Mr. Clavell's novels, no one doubted his gifts as a storyteller, or his ability to draw the reader into a faraway time and place."
"Shogun is irresistible… I can't remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one… It's almost impossible not to continue to read Shogun once having opened it. Yet it is not only something that you read — you live it … possessed by the Englishman Blackthorne, the Japanese lord Toranaga and medieval Japan … People, customs, settings, needs and desires all become so enveloping you forget who and where you are."
"Get the right actor, and the job's halfway done. I've only miscast major people twice in my life – out of respect to them, I won't tell you who. After a couple of days' shooting, I had to tell them I was letting them go. It was hideous."
"Music is the fountainhead: everything comes from that. At the moment, I'm getting intoxicated on Beethoven, and I use Pink Floyd for inspiration while making a film. Their music contains a sound for almost everything I do."
"When you get a cut and think, 'I'm going to make a halfway decent film."
"The feeling that maybe you won't ever get your inspiration back. That's a very cold place to be."
"I really was keen on not doing his as a heinous arch-villain. But as person who was, at some state, a complex psychological being and a warrior on par with Van Helsing, and in fact a sort of brother in arms to Van Helsing. So one thing I attached myself to quite early was a kind of... because they come from the foothills of the Carpathians and nobody knows what the hell people looked like or spoke like back then, you know, 500 years ago. One thing that I kind of attached myself to was a sort of gypsy look. There's always been Romany going through that area. There's a look that's drawn from that history and apart from that, there are sound psychological reasons for why Dracula does the things that he does in this story, and I like that."
"I absolutely love Bela Lugosi's Count. One thing that always interesting to bear in mind in the great history of Dracula is that, I think almost without exception the film's release has always been surrounded by controversy. Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula at the time was regarded as essentially a kind of B-movie piece of junk. Whereas now, I think it has real luster and appeal to people. I looked at Bella's Count again because Steve was interested in pursuing a sense of the old Universal films, I thought it was kind of good to do that."
"I’m finding the intrusion of the state into everything in our lives increasingly intolerable, we are being dismantled as thinking adults to the extent that we are dumbing down. Eventually we will become completely politically, spiritually, mentally enfeebled … That’s the future, that’s what we’re looking down the barrel of, and it shits me."
"I think Richard forgets he is an actor," Colloca once said. "He never talks about it, he never wants to watch himself. I am the one who is always trying to get him out to see shows. Richard says it can be a stupid profession and he is right."
"I love coming in with a battle plan, but I also love the freedom to make things up with my actors, and my DP, too. Sometimes we’ll be in a scene and I see new things we can do, so I will throw whatever stuff that has been cooking away in my brain for a long time because I think what I'm coming up with on the set might serve the film better. You know, your instinct will tell you, “This is a better way, try this other way instead,” and that's very important for me, and that is my style of filmmaking, for better or for worse. That's how I like to approach it. And a lot of it comes to me when I'm designing the script, the screenplay. I'm generally very involved in the screenplay, even the ones I'm not on officially as a writer, I'm still extremely involved in how I craft the screen with the writers. I like to get in there and I really craft the world so I can have an idea of how all that will play out before I go on set. Then when I go on set, I like to keep it free, so that I can improvise with my actors."
"I think for me anyway, the most successful horror movies that work are the ones that can create characters who you care about and that have characteristics that resonate with you and I think that is highly important, because if you can create characters that are likeable and people you can relate to, to me it makes the scares that much more scarier."