screenwriters-from-scotland

"We like to think we're free in the ; that we're beyond the forces of advertising and social manipulation by market forces. But there is a new — the rise of 'the single person' as model consumer — that presents us with a paradox. What we once thought of as radical — staying single - may now be reactionary. The long-term relationship, like the job-for-life, is fast being deregulated into short term, temporary arrangements with no promise of commitment, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has been warning us for over a decade. It's hard for two people to be self-employed, with no promise of a stable future, together. Capitalism now wants us to be single."

"Will books, as we know them, come to an end? Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, s and will mean the end of . Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist."

"Communal living: Plato recommended it, 19th-century religious separatists tried it, anarchists and hippies spectacularly failed at it. Attempting to live with no an . It's supposed to erase greed and create equality. You'd think that this important subject would have created a vast body of literature, but you'd be wrong. Novels about s are very rare and this might be because the ideal of "the communal" is at loggerheads with the bias towards "the individual" in the novel. But there are some gems, which are important documents of a noble, failed, social experiment."

"I think a lot of filmmakers think a story is the purpose of the film and that the characters and the actors really have just got to service the story and take it to where it's going. And that seems to me to be the complete opposite of what should be happening 'cause there should be no story. I mean, we spend our lives inventing stories but story actually doesn't exist, you know? We exist and our apprehension of a story is how we explain the, kind of, meanderings that we take, so... there is no such thing as the empirical story, it's just what happens to people."

"Kind of a treble agent, see?" Schaffer said in a patient explaining tone. "That's one better than double."

"Foster always said that education was very important, but that it didn't really matter, because intelligence was more important than that, and that even intelligence didn't count for so much, that wisdom was far more important still. He said he had no idea in the world whether you had education or intelligence or wisdom and that it couldn't matter less, a blind man could see that you had a good heart, and the good heart was all that mattered in this world."

"The moment when a man hears that a girl's fiance has died only that day is the last moment that that man should ever begin to fall in love with her, but I'm afraid that's just how it was. The emotions are no respecters of the niceties, the proprieties and decencies of this life."

"Dr. MacDonald was a big heavily-built man in his late forties, with that well-leathered and spuriously tough look you quite often find among a certain section of the unemployed landed gentry who spend a great deal of time in the open air, much of it mounted on large horses in pursuit of small foxes."

"Every man is what environment and heredity make him."

"Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is"

"To all things an end, to every night its dawn; even to the longest night when dawn never comes, there comes at last the dawn."

"Many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side."

"She plunged down and kept on going down, driving down to the black floor of the Arctic, driven down by the madly spinning screws, the still thundering engines her own executioner."

"Major Rutledge of the Buffs, Eton and Sandhurst as to intonation, millimetrically tooth-brushed as to moustache, Savile Row as to the quite dazzling sartorial perfection of his khaki drill, was so magnificently out of place in the wild beauty of the rocky, tree-lined bluffs of that winding creek that his presence there seemed inevitable."

"There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer."

"Cruelty and hate and intolerance are the monopoly of no particular race or creed or time. They have been with us since the world began and are still with us, in every country in the world."

"The intolerance of ignorance, not wanting to know – that is the last real frontier on earth."

"Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they'd comb their hair on the way down."

"This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly spoken words. ... "Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria."

"With a face and a figure and an acting talent like that, she could have had Hollywood tramping a path of beaten gold to her doorstep."

"He says if it's a choice between a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and internment in Switzerland he knows which side of the frontier he’s coming down on... After that we fly down the Swiss side of Lake Constance, turn east at Lindau, climb to eight thousand to clear the mountains and it’s only a hop, skip and jump to the Weissspitze." "I see," Smith said weakly. "But—but don't the Swiss object?" "Frequently, sir."

"It is no small thing, Major, to be lost in a blizzard in the night skies over war-torn Europe."

"I should have listened to Hunslett. Again I should have listened to Hunslett. And again for Hunslett's sake. But I didn't know then that Hunslett was to have time for all the sleep in the world."

"The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. ... It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made."

"Big crime is big business, and big criminals are big businessmen, running their illegal activities with all the meticulous care and administrative precision of their more law-abiding colleagues."

"The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn't the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once."

"They have every good reason to fear those from the outside world. We, ironically known as the civilizados—in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilised than we are—bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilisation, which harms them even more, and disease, which kills them."

"A terrified rat will swear to anything."

"When one searches any place, be it a gypsy caravan or a baronial mansion, methodically and exhaustively, one has to wreck it completely in the process."

"They had come a long way, those gypsies encamped for their evening meal on the dusty greensward by the winding mountain road in Provence. ... A long journey, hot and stifling and endlessly, monotonously repetitive across the already baking plains of Central Europe or slow and difficult and exasperating and occasionally dangerous in the traversing of the great ranges of mountains that had lain in their way."

"I was glad I was alive. Glad to be alive. It had been the sort of night that didn’t look like having any morning, but here I was and I was glad. The girls were glad. I was warm and dry and fed, the jonge Genever was happily chasing the red corpuscles in a game of merry-go-round, all the coloured threads were weaving themselves into a beautiful pattern and by day’s end it would be over. I had never felt so good before. I was never to feel so good again."

"Unspecified exhortation, when translated into practice, is always liable to a certain amount of executive misdirection."

"We know about this deliberate policy admittedly as effective as it is suicidal—of endless provocation, waiting for something, for somebody to break. But please, Major Sherman, please do not try to provoke too many people in Amsterdam. We have too many canals."

""I am sorry, Miss Lemay. This must have been a great shock to you and it's all my fault. Will you come and have a drink with me? You look as if you need one." She dabbed her cheek some more and looked at me in a manner that demolished all thoughts of instant friendship. "I wouldn't even cross the road with you," she said tonelessly. The way she said it indicated that she would willingly have gone half-way across a busy street with me and then abandoned me there. If I had been a blind man."

"Schaffer caught her by the shoulders, kissed her briefly and smiled at her. She looked at him in surprise. "Well, aren't you glad to see me?" Schaffer demanded. "I've had a terrible time up there. Good God, girl, I might have been killed." "Not as handsome as you were two hours ago." She smiled, gently touched his face where Carraciola's handiwork with the Schmeisser had left its bloody mark, and added over her shoulder as she climbed into the bus: "And that's as long as you've known me." "Two hours! I've aged twenty years tonight. And that, lady, is one helluva long courtship.""

"The motorcycle patrol's decision to elect for discretion in lieu of suicidal valour was as immediate as it was automatic."

"The Major Smiths of this world don't drive over the edge of a cliff. Quotation from the future Mrs. Schaffer. The Major Smiths of this world don't fall off the roofs of cable cars. Quotation from the future. Mrs. Schaffer's future husband."

"She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble."

"They'll be coming for you, Mr. Jones. They'll be coming any moment now. I hate to say this, but I must. It is my duty to warn you what will happen to you, an enemy spy. You'll be tortured, Mr. Jones—not simply everyday tortures like pulling out your teeth and toe-nails, but unspeakable tortures I can't mention with Miss Ellison here—and then you'll finish in the gas chambers. If you're still alive. ... Oh God, when they strip you off and strap you down on the torture table—" Two seconds later Carnaby-Jones was over the sill and sliding down the nylon rope. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. Mary said, admiringly: "You really are the most fearful liar ever." "Schaffer keeps telling me the same thing," Smith admitted. "You can't all be wrong."

"Dear Faye, I feel a little fitter today. Perhaps everything will be fine after all ..."

"Actually I can't stand the man. Sanctimonious, Calvinistic, so-and-so. Totally unsympathetic -can't think why he became a doctor - hectoring, bullying-sort of moral storm-trooper.""

"Can't you keep this bloody place tidy?""

"There are so many hypochondriacs out here. I think Murray can spot them a mile off.""

"I want you to get to know Murray because I want you to bribe him.""

"My maid Innocence. She's dead.'"

"That's Africa for you, eh? Trouble-free sex and tranquillizers. What do they call it? Post-pill paradise or something. Load of nonsense. Never seen a more neurotic, glum bunch in my life.""

"He saw that she treated her marriage to his father as a relentless challenge, an unending struggle under adverse conditions to get her own way. At first this manifested itself only in the naming of her children, but lately, as she had come to know her enemy, or as he had grown more senile and eccentric, evidence of her own personality long-suppressed came increasingly to the fore."

"(Part One, Chapter Four)"

"It was a long journey back to Walter's farm, which lay near the foot of Kilimanjaro in British East Africa. First there was the coastal steamer from Dar to Tanga, and then a day's journey from Tanga to Moshi on the Northern Railway, followed by a further day's wagon ride across the border to B.E.A. and his won farm near the small town and former mission station of Taveta."

"(Part One, Chapter One, p. 19)"