Screenwriters From The United States

"Work alone qualifies us for life, Sentoni. It is much more exquisite to be blown from the tree as a flower than to be shaken down as a shriveled and bitter fruit."

"My life is like water that has gone over the dam and turned no mill wheels. Here I am, not happy, but not unhappy, as my days run on to the sea, idly—but not too swiftly—for I love living."

"Englishmen are like that. They love life more and value it less than any other people in the world."

"Indifferent to all the fun of chance I watched black spiders of inertia spin The far-flung web which I was strangling in."

"And I wonder if peace is enough for any man. ..."

"No one can ever help loving anyone."

"The Greeks had a word for it."

"To accuse is so easy that it is infamous to do so where proof is impossible!"

"I know not where I go; I scarcely feel The menacing fatigue about my feet, The skies that scourge, the distances that cheat, the constant wounds that never hurt nor heal."

"I am the wind that wavers, You are the certain land; I am the shadow that passes Over the sand."

"In those hours and days that followed Pearl Harbor the city of Washington was afflicted with jitters. Some people who knew the extent of the damage that the Japs had inflicted, were talking darkly of disaster. They were talking of the imminence of grave danger to our country—even of the possibility of Japanese invasion of our West Coast, or of Nazi raids on our East Coast. I didn’t know how real or how valid these fears might be. But—when I went into the presence of the president himself—I heard no talk of "disaster," no jitters. I knew that I was back in America. The president loved those ships that were hit at Pearl Harbor. When they were hit, it was as if the Japs had hit his own family. But he knew—he knew with all the confidence of a loyal American—he knew that no Japs and no Nazis—nor all the Japs and all the Nazis put together—could ever deliver a knockout blow against this country. He knew—better, perhaps, than any man who ever lived—he knew what Americans are and what Americans can do. And in those hours and days, after Pearl Harbor, the president would sit back and lean back in his chair, in his oval study up there on the second floor of the White House, and he stated very clearly and very simply what he thought our military strategy in this war ought to be. He completely rejected a defensive policy. He rejected the policy of withdrawing our Navy into our home waters, and of deploying our growing, magnificent Army in foxholes and trenches along our coasts. What he said, immediately after Pearl Harbor, was this: "We must go out there, where our enemies are, and fight them on their own home grounds. We must go out and find them, and hit them—and hit them again." And that has been the summary of our whole policy in fighting this war."

"There has been no attempt made in this series to be inspirational. War has not been painted as a delightful or glorious experience, but simply and straightforwardly as the cold, grim, scientific business that it is."

"You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything…You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all."

"A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower."

"I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse."

"You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore."

"They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay."

"Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too."

"When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. [...] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion."

"Sure there’s a hell... It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place here mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it."

"I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway."

"What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot."

"She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good."

"There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem."

"I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more."

"I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped."

"What else is there to do but laugh and joke... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?"

"Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle."

"If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow."

"Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got."

"There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living."

"Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example."

"We're living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty."

"He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self."

"There was too much of a sameness about the evening’s delights. He had been the same route too many times. He’d been there before, so double-damned often, and however you traveled—backward, forward, or walking on your hands—you always got to the same place. You got nowhere, in other words, and each trip took a little more out of you."

"That was the way one had to do. To do the best one could, and accept things as they were. Usually, they did not seem so bad after a while; if they were not actually good, then they became so by virtue of the many things that were worse. Almost everything was relatively good. Eating was better than starving, living better than dying."

"It’s easy as nailing your balls to a stump and falling off backwards."

"If we all had all we wanted to eat, we’d crap too much. We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry."

"He sees death in convicted thieves, the burglars, the muggers, the con men, the pimps, a death imposed by law, the gradual death of confinement behind bars."

"He sees death in the prostitutes who have witnessed the death of honor, and daily multiply the death of love, who bleed away their own lives 50 times a day beneath the relentless stabbings of countless conjugations."

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

"He sees it in the juvenile street gangs, who live in fear of death and who propagate fear by inflicting death to banish fear. And he sees it at its worst, as the result of violent emotions bursting into the mind and erupting from the hands."

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

"The hand that holds the money cracks the whip."

"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."

"A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you."

"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."

"Let's get stinko."

"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."

"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."