Screenwriters From The United States

"By nine, Mildred was powdered, puffed, perfumed, and patted to that state of semi-transparency that a woman seems to achieve when she is really dressed to go out."

"I make no conscious effort to be tough, or , or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this ' of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort."

"I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren't drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great-grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night."

"Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts."

"He might be asleep, but even asleep he looked like he knew more than most guys awake."

"We’re just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have. And we just weren’t the kind that could have it. We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us."

"Have you got a little bit of gypsy in you?""Gypsy? I had rings in my ears when I was born."

"A woman is a funny animal."

"We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual."

"They threw me off the hay truck about noon."

"We're the friendliest enemies that ever were."

"I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church."

"Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny."

"Just you and me and the road."

"Restaurant, hey. That's what I've got. Whole goddam country lives selling hot dogs to each other."

"That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate."

"When she tired, I loosened up a little, to let her blow. Yes, it was rape, but only technical, brother, only technical. Above the waist, maybe she was worried about the sacrilegio , but from the waist down she wanted me, bad. There couldn’t be any doubt about that."

"A receptionist is a lazy dame that can’t do anything on earth, and wants to sit out front where everybody can watch her do it."

"Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.""It's a date."

"Sit here, now, and look. The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. 'Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty. So it is with Mexico. I hope you never forget it."

"Love, when you get fear in it, it’s not love any more. It’s hate."

"I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake."

"I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the Earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble."

"She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another."

"If you have to do it, you can do it."

"He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical."

"As a director, you have the job of dreaming up the movie, and then you have to get everyone else in the movie – hundreds of people – to have that same dream, too."

"“The process of making it was just joy,” said Gerwig. “I don’t know if it was the pink or the music but it was just infectious.” Yet the most gratifying aspect, she said, was seeing strangers watch the film and realising that “the song that’s in my heart is in other people’s hearts”."

"The kind of amazing thing is that Barbie went to the moon before women had the ability to get credit cards."

"When you’re 16, there are qualities you wish you didn’t have, and then when you’re 30 you’re like, ‘Thank god I have that otherwise I’d be living less vividly’. You only get one life so you might as well feel all the feelings."

"When you’re writing a screenplay, it’s like you’re dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it...Nobody in the world cares if it doesn’t exist. You have to either believe in this fiction hard enough for it to become real, or you don’t, and it won’t."

"I always think that 8, 9, 10 years old is peak kid. I was brash and unafraid and loud and big."

"[Puberty is] a shrinking. Wanting to make yourself smaller, less noticeable, take in all that spikiness and bury it. And you’re profoundly uncomfortable, because you’re going through metamorphosis, literally."

"The normality of the world we live in is completely insane. Okay? Now, what are you going to do? All of you have to make a living, so you have to get a job. I would say you don't have to do that. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to get a job. You don't have to earn that money. You can do something else -- if you wish. If you're willing not to have security. If you're willing to work with other people. If you're willing to take that beautiful Zen statement: leap and your net will appear."

"When Koyaanisqatsi came out in 1982 (it was begun in 1975), this film taught me to look at the root of the future. Bob Dylan's song "Blowing in the Wind" comes to mind. Our future is blowing in the wind. You can see it in the tense I've created for my films, "the future present", or the rooted future. What we saw in Koyaanisqatsi almost 300 years ago, is even more coming true now because of the rooted future we live in. If you want to change things, I suggest you say no to the rooted future and create a future for yourself. We have a choice to change what's happening."

"I call the films I make experiental. If this doesn't sound too weird, I look at the films I've been involved in as my children. When they're born, then they take on a life of their own. To try and remake your child is not a very good idea. What advice would I give to you? Whatever you're interested in, whatever you can do, do it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. (That's a paraphrase of a Goethe quote)"

"The technology we have, is probably the most violent act against the planet that we can conceive of, more than the wars on the battlefield. The price we pay for technological happiness is bringing the planet to our knees. It's not something we use, it's as ubiquitous as the air we breathe."

"I have a lot of admiration for the director [Godfrey Reggio] because he knew how to give not just pretty pictures or images but was able, through a play of images, to give a critique of the modem world that is very close to my own. But it's rather amusing to consider how differently different people can interpret this film. My wife, for example interpreted it as the story of the development of the world and its progression -- as a presentation of the creation of the world moving along into, very probably, an apocalypse. But one of my friends had a completely opposite reaction to the film. He thought that in the beginning it presented chaos, then moved after that into showing the progressive development of order. So you can see that the interpretation of images is very difficult."

"What is patriotism other than mysticism? The sadness and the danger, of course, is that we have become totally dependent on mass society for life itself. It’s not as if we have much choice. What can we do? These concepts are unutterable. They’re now beyond the pale of language. This is partly why I have used Hopi, a non-literate language, to name my films."

"As much as he’s done for freedom of speech or whatever, he really doesn’t like what I’m doing."

"I was raised to have great parents, and I was raised to believe that I had power, as big or small as it was. It was there and it was to be utilized. That’s something that I want a lot of women to get the opportunity to feel."

"The real historical Dracula was a knight who swore to protect the cross and church in C.E.1400. A charismatic hero for his people. He later turned into a bloodthirsty monster."

"Stoker is the boring and inflexible director of the Lyceum Theatre. He writes an exceptionally erotic, oral and feverish tale that is avoided like the plague. So I would tell people to read it. Nobody reads the book in this town."

"Despite the character's darkness, Gary invested... Dracula was not simply to be feared, but also to be loved."

"Fred Saberhagen and James V. Hart, Bram Stoker's Dracula, translated by Bruno Amato, Sperling & Kupfer Editori S.p.A., C.E.1993."

"All the Dracula films I've seen are literally bland compared to what Bram Stoker wrote in C.E.1897."

"Civilization marches hand in hand with syphilis."

"I often feel disheartened by the direction that our politics, courts and culture are taking. But I do not lose faith in our country or its future. I remind myself how far we have come."

"It is remarkable to consider that television — the medium for which I am most well-known — did not even exist when I was born, in 1922. The internet came along decades later, and then social media. We have seen that each of these technologies can be put to destructive use — spreading lies, sowing hatred and creating the conditions for authoritarianism to take root. But that is not the whole story. Innovative technologies create new ways for us to express ourselves, and, I hope, will allow humanity to learn more about itself and better understand one another’s ideas, failures and achievements."

"Reaching this birthday with my health and wits mostly intact is a privilege. Approaching it with loving family, friends and creative collaborators to share my days has filled me with a gratitude I can hardly express. This is our century, dear reader, yours and mine. Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future."