Screenwriters From The United States

"Beautiful is a word for young people. Beauty is a phase you grow through, like acne."

"There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous."

"Goddam organizers, he thought. You get something good going, and somebody comes along and organizes it. He told himself that this was inevitable, the way of the world, but it bothered him. The raven would have been in favor of a movement in the general direction of chaos, consternation, and disorganization, had he not known that such a project would require the most organization of all. Besides, there would undoubtedly be a squirrel running it."

"He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don’t. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us."

"I’m sure I’ll go to heaven. I’ve been dull enough."

"Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal."

"I walked a long way that night, thinking many philosophic thoughts which, fortunately, I don’t remember."

"“The dead,” he had said once, “need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead.” At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known."

"He had always detested funerals and avoided them as much as possible. But it’s different, he thought, when it’s your own funeral. You feel it’s one of those occasions that shouldn’t be missed."

"I’ve always thought cemeteries were like cities. There are streets, avenues—you’ve seen them, I think, Michael. There are blocks, too, and house numbers, slums and ghettos, middle-class sections and small palaces."

"“Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it. We’d much rather be eagles, or swans, or even one of those moronic robins, but we’re ravens and there you are. Ravens don’t feel right without somebody to bring things to, and when we do find somebody we realize what a silly business it was in the first place.” He made a sound between a chuckle and a cough. “Ravens are pretty neurotic birds. We’re closer to people than any other bird, and we’re bound to them all our lives, but we don’t have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard.”"

"Now is it their friendship I want, he wondered, or their dependency?…Am I so tired and so purposeless that I want to keep them with me forever, living off their need and their loneliness? You can’t do that, Jonathan. They are minds, and you cannot make minds dependent on you. That would surely make you the devil."

"Didn’t listen, did he? They never do. That’s the nature of a Goro. Just as not wanting to know things is the nature of humans."

"“There are people,” he said, “who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don’t do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It’s born in you, whether you give or take, and that’s the way you are.”"

"It was an old trick, one he remembered from every discussion and bull session he had ever taken part in: if you don’t know, make it up. Nobody ever admitted he didn’t know a quotation, or a book, or an essay on something. The rule also had a corollary: if you’re not sure, it’s Marlowe."

"“She’s a lady,” I says, “for all she’s a Portygee, and you’re no more a gentleman than that monkey in your mango tree. Money don’t make such as us into gentlemen, Henry Lee. All it does, it makes us rich monkeys. You know that, same as me.”"

"But that instant, that particular recognition, remains indelible. Some memories do come to live with you for good and all, like wives or husbands."

"Sometimes, in those nights when the dreams and memories I cannot always tell apart anymore keep me awake, I try to imagine what my life would have been if I had actually carried my plan through. Different, most likely. Shorter, surely."

"When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left."

"The Unicorn Sonata … tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes — and our ears — to find it."

"What am I always telling you, big girl? Never bet on anything except human stupidity."

"We stared at each other in silence for some while, and then I asked him, most politely, “What are you?” “What I need to be,” he answered. “Now this, now that, as necessary. As are we all.”"

"I was lost too. What else would I have been doing in Iowa?"

"Kings need jugglers, jugglers don’t need kings…"

"So they believe, and they take poorly to having it named nonsense. Which I am very nearly sure it is."

"He had foreseen every such change in his fortune, ignored it always, and called the refusal innocence."

"If I sound petty and malicious, it’s because I am."

"Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets."

"I was writing the 'Great American Novel' and Dick was writing the 'Great American Symphony'. Together we were digging the 'Great American Hole-In-The-Ground'."

"It took us ten years to become an overnight success."

"We had great sex, but we argued politics. [...] Now we enjoy politics and argue sex."

"Now they know who we are. We’re counted in their surveys, we’re numbered in their watchfulness, we’re powered in their press. We’re courted, polled, placated. Now they know that we’re teachers and doctors and lawyers and priests and mothers and babies. Now they see us everywhere. Hospitals, theatres, classrooms. Obituaries. Now when they tell lies about us, we answer back. We found our voices. We know who we are. They know who we are. And they know that we care what they think."

"You’d probably just lost your virginity, I’d probably just lost count."

"See, I went to an all-gay high school. Art and Design. Now the truth is it wasn’t really all gay, but they bused them in, it was the law. [...] So I went to this high school, I had friends like Pablo. Pablo used to breast-feed a porcelain doll during math. You know. My friend Lauren used to roll cigarettes on her boots."

"To the delight of millions of little children, the Santa in New York's great parade will be half of a same-sex couple. And guess who the other half will be? Me! Harvey Fierstein, nice Jewish boy from Bensonhurst, dressed in holiday finery portraying the one and only Mrs. Claus."

"Hello, boys. How are you all? I just love boys. [...] Hello. Are you here alone? Who are you with? ...A woman? At my show? ...We'll make believe. It's theatre."

"I’ve been travelling a lot. My boyfriend and I, we just went to Santa Fe. You know, the one named after the gay saint. Has anybody ever been to Santa Fe? …did you know it was a desert? I didn’t know it was a desert. Hated it! People had been telling me for years, if you’re an artist, a non-conformist, come to Santa Fe! I mean, it’s the place you can be yourself! The light, the light, you can paint here! You can live here, the space, the sky! – The fucking dust! I was doing an AIDS benefit there – like what else do I do with my life? – and I said, look, I’m a guest here, you’re paying for the hotel, I don’t mean to insult nobody, but I got a little suggestion for you. If I was yaz, I’d take a hose, hook it up to Colorado, and water this fucking place!"

"Do you remember at the presidential convention where they nominated Bush? Did you know what song they played to bring Bush on stage? No. “The Best of Times” from La Cage aux Folles. I said some fag pulled a fast one on them!"

"I live in a small fictional town in Connecticut."

"Nothing is unfair in politics"

"Screen credit is valuable only when it's given you. If you're in a position to give yourself credit, you don't need it."

"You don't put statistics on trial, you put individuals on trial."

"One of the most basic things I've tried to do is give people a greater understanding of how science works - the importance of evidence, the importance of many trials, of rigorous studies, and the idea that we learn only a little bit at a time. . . . Making people aware of that process helps increase appreciation and respect for science, and that helps us make informed decisions for our families and ourselves."

"I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be."

"The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values."

"My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six."

"… life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it's as though you aren't there."

"I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend."

"While Mr. Matheson's name is not as recognizable as that of Mr. King, perhaps no author living is as responsible for chilling a generation with tantalizing nightmare visions born of Golden Age television. Together with Rod Serling, Mr. Matheson wrote many of the classic Twilight Zone episodes for the original CBS series, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "Little Girl Lost" and "Third From the Sun.""

"He has many … virtues, notably an unusual agility in trick prose and trick construction and a too-little-recognized (or exercised) skill on offtrail humor; but his great strength is his power to take a reader inside a character or a situation."