Screenwriters From The United States

"I don't believe she's in Heaven and I don't believe she's in a better place. She's dead and when we're dead, we're gone. There are no blinding lights, there is no happy music, there are no angels waiting to greet us. St. Peter is not at the Pearly Gates with a big fat fucking book, our friends and Relatives are not holding a seat for us at a divine dinner table, we do not get a tour of Heaven. We're dead and that is it. No more."

"He starts to break and seeing him start to break makes me start to break and I don't want that. He steps forward and puts his arms around me and he hugs me and I hug him and it feels good and strong and pure and real. This is my Brother, my Blood, the only thing in this World created from which I am created from, the Person in this World who knows me best, the Person who would miss me most if I was gone. That he cared enough to come here and that he cares enough to nearly break in front of me means something, but in the end, I know that it means only so much."

"I look at Hank and he nods and I nod and for a brief second I feel strong. Not strong enough to face myself, but strong enough to keep going."

"Will you accept three hundred dollars per week to work for Paramount? All Expenses paid. The Three Hundred is Peanuts, millions are to be grabbed out here and your only comepetition is idiots. Don't let this get around."

"There, but for the grace of God, goes God."

"Never care what anybody says."

"I don't know how it is that you start working at something you don't like, and before you know it you're an old man."

"As Gloria Steinem said about Ginger Rogers: She was doing everything Fred Astaire was doing, just doing it backwards in high heels. Well, Southern women are doing and enduring what other women have to do and endure, but (at least until recently) they had to do it in heels and hats and white gloves and makeup and a sweet smile, with maybe a glass of bourbon and a cigarette to get them through the magnolia part of being a steel magnolia."

"I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure."

"There is nothing more profoundly serious than real comedy, which is an affirmation of human communion, redemption and grace."

"You have to be taught to leave us alone. Leave us alone."

"If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are."

"If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't fuck them."

"We watched everything...A family favorite was Cry-Baby starring Johnny Depp. Whenever the John Waters film broke out in song, we would all scream and start singing, too."

"Waters might, once upon a time, have been a candidate to be the American Buñuel, especially when he had the raw hatred of Divine under his command..."

"Cheer up. You never know — maybe something awful will happen tomorrow."

"Going to a sensational murder trial is the only way I can relax."

"I'll never be able to do a sequel to Pink Flamingos because it would have to end with Divine taking a shit and the dog eating it."

"Parents should worry if their children haven't been arrested by the time they turn sixteen. Being a juvenile delinquent is a birthright and as much a part of healthy adolescence as smoking cigarettes or getting pimples."

"I'd never trust anyone who hadn't spent at least one night of his youth in the local jail. The more hell you raise as a teen-ager, the sweeter your memories will be."

"Life is nothing without a good sense of humor."

"I would never want to film hard-core pornography, because it always looks like open-heart surgery to me."

"[I] pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value."

"I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore... It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay. No one moves here."

""How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder."

"We're husky, we're hairy, we're homosexual, and out of the second closet."

"And we can cuddle all night!"

"To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits while watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste."

"I've always tried to push things to the limit, but when I started, the censors to be feared were old, conservative, religious men, whereas today the censors are young, rich, liberal men who seem to be against the freedom of expression I fought for. [...] people should be able to have an opinion they don't agree with and still be friends, have a dialogue, or argue about it."

"I stopped taking drugs when I realized that pot smelled bad and LSD trips were becoming like TV reruns. I had had enough inner journeys — I felt I knew myself well enough, thank you."

"Wouldn't you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict?"

"To me, camp is two older queens talking about Rita Hayworth under a Tiffany's lampshade."

"To understand bad taste one must have very good taste."

"All people look better under arrest."

"Animal rights acitivists always say to me, "How could you kill a chicken for a movie?" Well, I eat chicken and I know the chicken didn't land on my plate from a heart attack. We bought the chicken from a farmer who advertised freshly killed chicken. I think we made the chicken's life better. It got to be in a movie, it got fucked, and then right after filming the next take, the cast ate the chicken!"

"He [JKF] is one of the most important presidents because he was for peace at a time when we were on the brink of war. In 1960, when he ran, the Pentagon was ready to take out Russia on the first strike. This was what their thinking was: "We gotta nail these bastards now" ... That was their Dr Strangelove thinking. Johnson put us right back smack into the middle of the biggest war we'd ever had since WWII and it was a disaster, as you know. A debacle."

"Putin is a great leader for his country and the people love him."

"Movie critics have complained that the movie lacks coherent vision. The fault may not be Stone's. We know what Alexander] did, and it continues to astonish us, but we don't know how or why he did it... Stone suggests some noble purpose for Alexander's mad, bloody tromp across Asia. He and his historical consultant shared a need to give meaning to a meaningless conquest."

"The Warren commission (into Kennedy’s assassination) was a sham. They (meaning the intelligence agencies) appointed it. Lyndon Johnson basically didn't want problems because he says he feared war with Russia over Cuba. That was his excuse. But if he’d really looked at the case, if he had had proper intelligence agencies working with him, he (would have known) that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with this assassination. Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy wrote to (Russian president) Khrushchev saying, "We know it’s not you; we know it’s a right-wing plot from our own country." And that's what it was."

"[On his documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (2021)] As one of our interviewers, David Talbot, says in the film, once you kill a sitting president in high noon in Dealey Plaza and blow his head off, you're not going to go back to normal and say, "Oh, wow! We found this whacky--this crazy lone nut who killed him." It doesn't work. It doesn't really work as a narrative for this country. What happened was much deeper than that, and there was so many inconsistencies, so many holes in the Warren Commission... The point is that you cannot remove legitimacy from government like that and get away with it, and the people knew something was wrong. They didn't know exactly what was wrong, but they sensed that something had gone astray, like anarchy has set in. Some method of control was being exerted because forces that were more powerful than one person were able to kill him, forces that were somewhat, I mean, clearly related to intelligence agencies, to possible military agencies, and these forces came to dominate American life..."

"After Kennedy was killed, and nobody asked... what was Kennedy's real policy on Vietnam? Well... he was going to pull out of Vietnam. He was very clear about it, and that's what people get confused. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, who took over the office went right to war quickly. He went to a far more aggressive posture of Vietnam, which resulted in more-- It was a lie, another lie, and that war was a disaster... Unfortunately, the same forces that made that war happen continued in our life, and they controlled us and pushed us into another war and another war and another war... we propagandize an enemy, make him far bigger than he is, and I don't know what we're fighting."

"In their ten-part cable television documentary series and seven-hundred-page companion book The Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick ask: "Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts? Why does the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation poses an imminent threat?" These are key questions. Stone and Kuznick condemn the situation but do not answer the questions. The authors see the post-World War II development of the United States into the world's sole superpower as a sharp divergence from the founders' original intent and historical development prior to the mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British colonialism and claimed that the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." Stone and Kuznick fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding."

"There's been a campaign, a war against Russia going on for a long time. It started again in the United States around 2006... there's no evidence really of the aggressiveness of Russia. The aggressiveness is truly coming from the NATO forces that have encircled Russia and that are also, by the way, encircling China. You know, this is a big policy point, huge, of huge importance... we have to have people in the United States who speak up for the peace point of view... Let's get along with China. Let's get along with Russia, Iran, and so forth. We have to change our point of view because we are seeking to still be the only power in the world that is in control of the world. We cannot continue on this path; it's a suicidal path. And I think many Americans agree with me, but it's never been allowed to be stated politically. People who say this type of stuff never win elections because they're ridiculed or marginalized in the press, to be honest."

"Oliver Stone, an American writer and an Oscar winning filmmaker will present his documentary about Ukraine [Revealing Ukraine] at the 65th Taormina Film Festival... in Sicily on June 30 - July 6. ... The documentary... reveals the details of the 2014 uprising in Ukraine, discloses the connection between interference to the recent presidential elections in the U.S. and Ukraine, casts the light into the current situation with the conflict in Donbas."

"Former president Jimmy Carter recently made a profound and damning statement — the United States is the "most warlike nation in the history of the world." Carter contrasted the United States with China, saying that China is building high-speed trains for its people while the United States is putting all of its resources into mass destruction. Where are high-speed trains in the United States, Carter appropriately wondered."

"As if to prove Carter’s assertion, Vice President Mike Pence told the most recent graduating class at West Point that it "is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life... You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen." Clearly referring to Venezuela, Pence continued, "Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere." In other words, Pence declared, war is inevitable, a certainty for this country."

"Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept."

"The most shocking part [about the assassination of JFK] is...the sequence of the shooting, the timing,... the wounds and the autopsy. It’s all quite shocking when you...think seriously about it. It doesn’t make any sense the way they described it. That’s the most shocking part of the case. When you start to investigate Oswald, of course there are a thousand interesting things that come up. The files on Oswald were much more closely supervised by the CIA then we knew at the time and were omitted by the Warren Commission. They treated it like a routine investigation, but it was hardly so. We draw a line between the cover-up and the assassination. The cover-up is filled with another cast of characters. That is to say, the Warren Commission itself, who is in charge of the investigation; and the main man, Alan Dulles, the ex-chief of the CIA and one of the most powerful figures in government. He was fired by Kennedy, as were all his top officials, two years earlier. He was put in charge of the investigation and buried certain information. That’s part of the cover-up."

"Fidel Castro was a brilliant person who predicted everything that has happened in the world since 2001... I made the film Comandante with the idea that it would be a historical profile of the man. The film can be seen on YouTube, but it could never be screened in theaters in the United States because they censored it and removed it a week before it was due for release...Then we made Looking for Fidel, which was possibly the most aggressive interview with Fidel. I asked him very difficult questions and that movie was screened on HBO. However, given the good job that Fidel did answering the questions they do not put it on enough on U.S. television. HBO instructed me to ask Fidel hard, tough questions, to put him on the spot. As you all know, that was not easily done and he was brilliant in his answers to all my questions. I think that’s why HBO has not shown the movie again."

"Another film from Dreamworks which is also going to be unfriendly … I don't think most people in the US realise how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support."