Screenwriters From The United States

"I was working with these kids ages 8-13, and I thought, oh, I remember being that age, and that is the state I would like to be in. Because they were very kind, they were very thoughtful, and they also knew that they had no control over their lives at all."

"It is a leap year, as I said. Leap year began in the year 45 B.C. under Julius Ceasar. This is true. He started the leap year in order to correct the calendar and we still do it to this day. Another thing that happened under Julius Ceasar was, uh, he was such a powerful maniac that all the senators grabbed knives and they stabbed him to death. That would be an interesting thing if we brought that back."

"Travelling can get kinda lonely sometimes, or, not travelling, what is the word? Uh, life, life can get kinda lonely. Sometimes I'll be talking to someone and I'll be like, "yeah, I've been really lonely lately", and he'll be like, "well, we should hang out", and I'm like, no, that's not what I meant. Not what I meant at all."

"It's been proven that people will take information from a female voice, but they will only take a warning from a male voice. Now that's its own American gender nightmare that we don't have time to get into."

"I was a cool person at one time. I used to do cocaine."

"If there's a hell, I think it's an encyclopedia, and you can just look up what everyone in your life thought about you. And if there is a heaven, it's a wikipedia, and you can just change that."

"When I walk down the street, I need everyone to like me so much. It's exhausting. My wife said that walking around with me was like walking around with someone who's running for mayor of nothing."

"If you’re an adult male who sees no flaws in his father, you’re an insane person."

"From an early age, I tried to be funny for the adults. [...] I think I thought and feel still that I have to provide that in order for people to like me."

"I'm not saying it's a bad movie. It is, but that's not my point."

"13-year-olds are the meanest people in the world. They terrify me to this day. [...] Eighth-graders will make fun of you, but in an accurate way. They will get to the thing that you don't like about you. They don't even need to look at you for long, they'll just be like, "hey, look at that high-waisted man, he got feminine hips". And I'm like, "no, that's the thing I'm sensitive about!""

"Usually when I need to name a character, I look around the studio and see who I could hand 15 nano-seconds of fame to."

"If I had any advice to give, it's to be your own toughest critic when you write a spec or pitch -- a great idea goes a long way, but it's important to craft and polish your work so that you're communicating your ideas clearly and concisely, and that they're as entertaining as can be (remember, competition is stiff). And if you're pitching, put yourself in the mind of the producer or executive you're pitching to: figure out how to make your idea specific to the show, yet be inventive -- they'll want to hear something they might not have come up with on their own, that's why they're taking pitches in the first place."

"He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."

"I'm one of the worst drivers I have ever seen, and I just want you all to know that, if you're ever on the highway behind me, I hear you honking, and I also don't want me to be doing what I'm doing."

"You know those days when you're like, "this might as well happen". Adult life is already so goddamn weird."

"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

"For me, the story always comes from character whether they're ponies or robots or aliens."

"I have a girlfriend now myself, which is weird because I'm probably gay, based on the way I act and behave and have walked and talked for 28 years. I think I was supposed to be gay, I think like in heaven, they built like three quarters of a gay person, and then they forgot to flip the final switch, and they just sent me out, and it was like, "you marked that one gay, right?", and it was like, "oh, no, was I supposed to?", and they were like, "oh, man this will be a very interesting person"."

"It is so much easier not to do things than to do them that you would do anything is totally remarkable."

"When you get to do a one-shot, the whole world is open to you. It’s almost harder to decide what story to tell when you have the freedom to do anything you want!"

"In terms of like, instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin."

"A "hero" is any man who does his job. You a lot of times see headlines that are like, "hero tutor teaches after school", and you're like, yeah."

"I’m definitely still wild at heart. But I’ve struck bio-gravity."

"Getting older is great, but I think bravery also comes with having a good career and high status. The world has shown me that bravery and honesty tends to be the better route. And I want to set an example for my daughter."

"…We’re starting to have those conversations and it’s messy, because it’s stuff that we haven’t reckoned with, ever…Like, everyone has always known not to grab an butt, or to not say point blank, ‘You’re a woman – you’re not funny.’ But even just 10 years ago, no one would have talked about a cultural problem in comedy."

"…He had always known the situation was messed up, but it took me calling him out. I told him: ‘I’ve been pissed at you. This was terrible and it hurt me and what you did was wrong’…[he did it] because he was afraid, because he was working on a script with these guys. It was bros before hoes."

"People can’t be creative if they feel threatened. You need people saying random weird stuff without feeling their boss will yell at them. And it worked. I think there has been an awakening of compassion, since, a reckoning with privilege."

"Never rub another man's rhubarb."

"The exiles, living in mud and fear of death, had, in one way at least, found a better home than those from which they had been driven, a blood-spattered Utopia, now on the fringe of German soil, where no man was rich and none poor, a shell-burst democracy where all living was a community enterprise, where all food was distributed according to need and not according to pocket, where light, heat, lodging, transportation, medical attention, and funeral benefits were at the cost of the government and available with absolute impartiality to white and black, Jew and Gentile, worker and owner, where the means of production, in this case M1s, 30 caliber machine guns, 90s, 105s, 204s, mortars, bazookas, were in the hands of the masses; that ultimate Christian socialism in which all worked for the common good and the only leisure class were the dead."

"If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women."

"Kill, if you must, because in our weakness and in our error, we have found no other road to peace, but kill remorsefully, kill with a sense of sorrow, kill with economy for the immortal souls who leave this life in battle, carry mercy in your cartridge cases, forgiveness in your knapsacks, kill without revenge, because vengeance is not yours but the Lord’s, kill, knowing that each life you spend makes your life that much the poorer."

"To the Generals eighty miles away, the reports on casualties are encouraging. To the man on the scene the casualties are never encouraging. When he is hit or when the man next to him is hit, when the ship fifty feet away explodes, when the Naval Ensign on the bridge is screaming in a high, girlish voice for his mother because he has nothing left below his belt, it can only appear to him that he has been involved in a terrible accident, and it is inconceivable at that moment to believe that there is a man eighty miles away who has foreseen that accident, encouraged it, made arrangements for it to happen, and who can report, after it has happened (although he must know about the shell, about the listing Landing Craft Infantry, about the wet decks and the screaming Ensign) that everything is going according to plan."

"(William) Burroughs was all about the future. Was all about liberation through the dismantling of presiding orders. He was a big influence on punk culture and punk music (and me) for that reason."

"Making a documentary is like having a dream. You can’t really anticipate what it will be. You have to constantly yield to whatever is manifested before you, to have the courage for whatever is revealed to you. Whatever truth confesses itself, even if it’s not what you anticipated. To just be a mirror. To invite in whatever arrives. To reflect it as loyally."

"We see our cities crumble under the enemy’s bombs, and we mourn for our children struck at their early tasks by the enemy’s bullets, and we strike back, cruelly and wildly, from the seabed of our hatred, at his cities and his children. The enemy is more savage than the tiger, hungrier than the shark, crueler than the wolf; in honor and in defense of our moderate way of life, we stand up to him and combat him, but in doing so we out-tiger him, out-shark the shark, over-wolf the wolf. Will we at the end of all this then pretend to ourselves that the victory is ours? The thing we defend perishes from our victory as it would never perish from our defeat."

"Do not boast to me in your newspapers of the thousands of tons of bombs you have let loose at random on the unhappy land of Germany, because I will tell you that you have let loose those bombs on me, on your church, on yourselves and on your God. Tell me, rather, how you have wept for the single German soldier you have been forced to kill as he stood before you armed and dangerous, and I will say, you are my defender and the defender of my church and my England."

"Our story is not really ours until we tell it, until it belongs to others too."

"Love is never more than a faith, and that’s why it’s so exciting."

"Love is at essence ritual of tandem fate, of harmonized experience. It’s a holy thing, that merging of consciousness. Our minds become authored by so many of the same events, colored by so much mutual memory."

"Patience is the only honest muse. In writing, in painting, and especially in photography."

"There is no artistic worth in compromise, in a pair, in collaboration, in obedient unity. These are all impossible terms. Action must come from the individual. The group (even if just a population of two) is only capable of reaction."

"(Lydia) Lunch and a lot of the no wave musicians were imbued with the wisdom—and neuroses—of genuine trauma. There's the divine madness in them. When Suicide's Alan Vega sneered, you might have actually found yourself bloodied shortly thereafter. You sure as hell wouldn't reach for your iPhone to Instagram and tag his #antics. You'd feel a little intruded upon, which is precisely how all the best art should make you feel."

"Don’t hunt for what to photograph. Let images find you. You wander your desert until worthy mirage appears. Wait until that worthy shot comes. And then try to capture it."

"Film photography just makes such an ally of chance, and chance is essential to any valid art, to the poetic…to life, to the spiritual."

"Any art should be advertising for one's soul."

"Photography is a hunt. But one that ends in the immortality of the prey, rather than the prey’s death."

"Collective subversion is conformity. The only true revolution is the singular one."

"This is not cinema harnessing life; this is life harnessing cinema. Not a film. An attempt at a film. The imperfect effort is ever present, mischievously decorating every frame. Reminding us: one never actually makes a film—one merely attempts to make a film. Reminding us: one never actually lives—one attempts to live."

"All lovers are runaways, are fugitives. Inheriting the entire world on that journey. Escaping to one another."