Screenwriters From The United States

"Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. That's the only reason for time. To squeeze you. Crush you. To tie you up in knots and make you fucking miserable."

"Its quite an experience to be locked up all by yourself in any size room, no less a little cell."

"He flowed deeper and deeper into himself, wrapped in the comforting strength of hate."

"A little sleep and then a little wakefulness. Then a slipping to some soothing place in between."

"A dark yet shallow sleep. A submission to exhaustion. A loss of consciousness and an avoidance of light, Yet not deep enough to avoid the turbulence on the surface while deep enough to feel the pressure from the bottom. Whatever or whoever he was sought to find the finite area where all pressures are equal and constant. To find that small pocket of weightlessness where no pressure is felt, where there is no tugging in opposite directions, no straining for a painless balance, where all of him was suspended and cushioned between the 2 crushing and yanking pressures where no pressures existed. Where no light existed. Where no time existed. Where no need or desire existed. Where there existed no blackness. There, where there existed nothing, not even a void."

"Yet the harder he fought to find this the more distant it became. The more he struggled against the pressures the more imprisoned he became. The more enmeshed he became in their conflicting directions. the further he was tugged in opposite directions that kept him immobile. And the harder he fought for movement, any movement, the more stationary became his position, the more painful his existence."

"He fought despairingly to go deeper into the blackness of a sleep, any sleep, even the sleep of death or some form of non-existence, but even with the loss of consciousness he dreamt he was awake, lying on the bed trying desperately to sleep. If he could find some way to prove that time had passed, no matter how short that time, he could tell himself that he had slept and perhaps then, just perhaps, he would feel rested."

"Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting."

"He replaced the gray of the walls with a darker shade by closing his eyes. It felt good to shut out some of the light. Not all, but just some. Just enough so there was a gray without images or threatening corners. Not the blackness that gives birth to those sudden flashes of stinging light that slashes your eyes, or the velvety darkness that thickens and become animated and flows and somehow moves around and over you. Just a soothing gray. Nothing to see."

"They dont know the terrors that go through your mind as you lie there in the pit waiting for a hint of light to tell you that the night is over."

"Theres always somebody bugging you. They just wont leave you alone. No matter how simple things are there always some sonofabitch complicating things and fucking with your life. Jesus, this fucking world stinks. People are nothing but a bunch of shits. A rotten bunch of shits. They always want to screw you."

"And their love life got better with time. Familiarity bred excitement. They loved discovering those little things, the touch, that made the other respond with a quiver or a sigh, and, in turn, having the discovery made."

"Time seemed stationary, yet the painful pressure of time was constantly felt. If only the pressure would crush the life out of him and allow him simply to sink into the inviting movement of clock hands or feel the passing of time he could then feel he was getting closer to something or at least further away from something, it didnt really matter which. Nothing really mattered. If only there were some kind of movement. But everything remained motionless, the body not even moving on the bed, while feeling the tearing pressures from all sides in all directions. Feeling deep within him in that pit where there lived the violent and contorting pain of maggots crawling through your guts between the rusty cans and broken bottles and the screaming urgency to get time to move, to just move before every FUCKING GODDAMN PART OF YOUR BODY SCREWS UP INTO A FUCKING BALL AND YOUR WHOLE FUCKING BODY DISINTEGRATES, JUST SHATTERS and there was no escape, even with the lack consciousness, for with it came dreams of wakefulness. There was no escape from the past. The struggle against it only entangled him deeper in the fear of the future. There was no place for him to go. No place he could hide. No place where his enemy didnt exist. No escape from unconscious wakefulness. There was no rest."

"And the goddamn subway reeked like a sewer. All those goddamn animals jammed into the train like the ark . . . yeah, thats what they are, a bunch of stinking animals."

"Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel."

"There is nothing worse than a cultural barbarian with pretensions."

"A cigarette only takes a certain amount of time to smoke and though this takes time it seems to take less and less with each one and you can only smoke so many, there comes a time when you have to stop, when you just cant light the next one . . . at least not for a while."

"Life must be a daring adventure or it is nothing at all. It's always a choice between joy and despair. I tried despair. Joy is more fun."

"Every human being is unique. We can generalize at length, but every human being is an individual. And this is especially true about children -- every child develops in their own unique way."

"I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think."

"I wish I could change it all. I wish I could. But I can’t. Dammit. Now I know what it’s like to have an indelible past—one that can’t be erased and changed at will. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening. And it makes me wish I had been more careful and thoughtful."

"I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it’s been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it’s voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big—and takes on that damned capital C—they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.) Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths."

"Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape."

"Now you see why I hate to leave my lab. It tires me out too much to have to do other people’s thinking for them."

"Life is full of little surprises. Time travel is full of big ones."

"You aren’t really jumping through time, that’s the illusion; what you’re actually doing is leaving one timestream and jumping to—maybe even creating—another. The second one is identical to the one you just left, including all of the changes you made in it—up to the instant of your appearance. At that moment, simply by the fact of your existence in it, the second timestream becomes a different timestream. You are the difference."

"You cannot avoid mortality. But you can choose your way of meeting it. And that is the most that any man can hope for. Live well, my son."

"It was not an unfamiliar sensation, but it was strange to feel it in the daytime. Mostly, it was a nighttime visitor, an ever-gentle gnawing at the back of the head that had to be always guarded against, lest its realization sweep forth with a cold familiar rush. It was the sudden startling glimpse over the edge—the realization that death is inevitable, that it happens to everyone, that it would happen to me too; that someday, someday, the all-important I (the center of the whole thing) would cease to exist. Would stop. Would end. Would no longer be. Nothing. Nobody. Finished. Death."

"HARLIE continued,"

"Ah well—the boss didn’t have to know how to run the business. He only needed to know how to run the people who knew."

"Not that he was jealous of the machine—but it was reassuring to know that there was still something that human beings could do that machines could not master. Love."

"“Whatever our purpose, we probably aren’t fulfilling it. We’re not functioning as we should.” He shrugged at her. “How should we function?” “Like human beings.” She said it righteously. “Isn’t that what the human race is already doing? Functioning like human beings—squabbling with each other, killing each other, hating...?” “That’s not human.” “Oh, but it is. It’s very human.” “Well, it’s not what human should be.” “Now that’s a different story. You’re not talking about what people are, but what you want them to be.” “Well, maybe we should be what we aren’t because what we are now isn’t good enough. Maybe we should be dismantled.” “I don’t think we have to worry too much about somebody up there doing it—we’re doing it ourselves.”"

"I’ve always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss."

"Auberson’s first impression of the man was of eight pounds of potatoes in a ten-pound sack."

"I’ve always suspected that Judas was the most faithful of the apostles, and that his betrayal of Jesus was not a betrayal at all, simply a test to prove that Christ could not be betrayed. The way I see it, Judas hoped and expected that Christ would have worked some kind of miracle and turned away those soldiers when they came for him. Or perhaps he would not die on the cross. Or perhaps—well, never mind. In any case, Jesus didn’t do any of these things, probably because he was not capable of it. You see, I’ve also always believed that Christ was not the son of God, but just a very very good man, and that he had no supernatural powers at all, just the abilities of any normal human being. When he died, that’s when Judas realized that he had not been testing God at all—he’d been betraying a human being, perhaps the best human being. Judas’s mistake was in wanting too much to believe in the powers of Christ. He wanted Christ to demonstrate to everyone that he was the son of God, and he believed his Christ could do it—only his Christ wasn’t the son of God and couldn’t do it, and he died. You see, it was Christ who betrayed Judas—by promising what he couldn’t deliver. And Judas realized what he had done and hung himself. That’s my interpretation of it, Auberson—not the traditional, I’ll agree, but it has more meaning to me. Judas’s mistake was in believing too hard and not questioning first what he thought were facts. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake."

"It was as private as the main floor of Hell."

"They say that killing is a mortal sin, that it is against the laws of God. If that is true—and I know now that it must be—if that is true, then every man who has ever taken a human life has been, from that moment on, damned for eternity. No matter how many men or nations say that it is all right for a man to take up arms against an enemy, it does not change that one basic fact—killing is a mortal sin. And every one of those simple white markers we had stood among represents a soul condemned. A nation had sentenced her sons to damnation so that she might survive. There’s no such thing as a “moral war.”"

"The sullen power of great violence forged into shapes of metal is always ugly."

"Hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy. Not only did I try to influence the course of their actions—but I dared to do it in the name of God—I tried to save their souls! I tried to save them from themselves! Is that so horrible? Ah, yes. It is the worst of all possible crimes."

"Don’t push the on-button if you don’t know where the off-button is."

"The way I heard it, a contract is a list of all the ways two people don’t trust each other."

"“So what happens when the camera is finally invented?” Handley let his breath escape in a whoosh. “The artists are out of jobs?” “Wrong. The artist simply have to learn how to do things that the camera can’t. The artist had to stop being a recorder and start being an interpreter. That’s when expressionism was born.”"

"There isn’t a tool built that can’t be used as a weapon."

"Love isn't what you get. It's what you create."

"“You could call it that,” Auberson sighed. It wouldn’t be correct, but you could call it that."

"There are only two times when it's appropriate for a man to have his nose in a woman's vagina. The first time is when he's stark naked and weighs about 7 lbs."

"The second time is by mutual consent."

"It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable."

"Desolate and dreary as the little town was in the world of today, it was infinitely more liveable than the same town of nearly two centuries before. There had been much progress in how to do things. It was regrettable that there was less progress in knowledge of things worth doing."

"“We’re fools!” said Harrison. “Morons! Idiots!” “If you speak of my altruism,” said Pepe cheerfully, “I agree. But if you speak of your interest in a very pretty girl, then I point out that nobody is ever as happy as while he is making a fool of himself over a woman."