Screenwriters

"I rely on it, it’s an addiction, the need to tell stories. If anything, my relationship with film has become more tense, more of a problem, because there is always that question: when will my time be up? Will this be the last film I make?...Perhaps this is the reason I haven’t developed any other facets of my life. Quite the opposite, I think I’ve cut back. So I’ve now reached the point where film is the only thing that makes me feel whole. Cinema is the only thing I have. It’s finished up being both the end and the means for me."

"I'm an artist…and I'm part of every decision in a movie. This is not how they work in Hollywood. There, the director is part of the crew, not the main creator. I'm too old to change now. I wouldn't know how to do it."

"In fact I was never the son my parents wanted. I mean, I think that they really loved me. But it’s something I realised from a very young age."

"Last year, sometime in November, I noticed a book in the window of the Sadoveanu"

"At last, she can sit down with the same emotion and anticipation felt before each meeting. The bed squeaks, recognizes her, and is happy to touch her. It is the only one that truly knows her, that deciphers the volutes of her brain and understands the delicate movements of the tiny creatures hidden in her capillaries. It took her 62 days to get here, to slide her fingers along its wooden surface, 62 suffocating days, the memories of which, although will fade, will leave toxins behind."

"The love is happiness to be only a rotting cloth in the wound of a stranger."

"The freedom is a tear digging into the flesh."

"Generous people are praised in books, but in everyday life they have nothing to show for it. The more grasping a person is, the wider doors open for them. No one loves the generous! They are admired for their praiseworthy deeds, and if they give you something, you accept it gratefully. But that’s as far as it goes. You don’t waste your time with a giver. You don’t go for a drink with them. You don’t make a philosophy of their gesture. And you don’t include them in your list of friends. Such a person is only good as a guarantor—the one who’s ready to stump up."

"And I understood that not only was I fated to see them again, searching for each other with the same looks which clearly showed that love’s fiery sphere had started to grow between them, but there was also something else, meant only for me. Without wanting to, I had entered the realm of shadows, where you cannot be seen. They were the only ones that could be seen, while I, until then at the centre of the story, was now drifting through the treacherous fog of strange desires, like a poor fly blown about in the wind."

"For in any person there is a ball of bitterness and desire, sometimes just lightly tickling like a butterfly, but in many other cases utterly unbearable, like hot coals that scorch everything around them."

"The agarwood gave off its perfume, and the vine oil clouded over, invaded by the ghosts of other lives, from the time when it was just a dry seed under heaps of limestone. The knife, the same knife that I had gripped in my hands without feeling its hidden power, that had sent Dubois to Marseille, sparked by the unseen veins that still bound it to Chelyabinsk, had begun to do its work."

"The Book of Perilous Dishes"

"Once he had turned the steak onto the other side, the madness began, as in a soul in love. Everything that followed after that, the salads, garnishes, and other accompaniments to the steak, was turned into the love letters, bouquets of flowers, and serenades by which men signal their desires and transmit news about the flow of their blood."

"I sat through the first act and heard my lovely lines falling like cold porridge on a damp mattress."

"...the standard arm was the most beautiful firearm ever invented, the famous short Lee Enfield.......She's a museum piece now, but I still see her on T.V. newsreels, in the hands of hairy, outlandish men like the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan and capable-looking gentry in North Africa, and I have a feeling that she will be loosing off her ten rounds rapid when the Kalashnikovs and Armalites are forgotten. That's the old reactionary talking: no doubt Agincourt die-hards said the same of the long bow."

"...only those who have been really dry know that there is no drink like chaggle water, brackish, chlorinated, with a fine earthy silt at the bottom, pure Gunga Din juice. We hated it and would have sold our souls for it."

"You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that account fall into the error of trying to adjust it to suit your own vision of what it ought to have been."

"Another discovery was that the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness. A big operation which commands headlines may be a dawdle for some of those involved, while the little forgotten patrol is a real horror."

"To learn the age-old lesson day by day: It is not in the bright arrival planned, But in the dreams men dream along the way, They find the Golden Road to Samarkand."

"I must emphasise that at private soldier level you frequently have no idea where you are, or precisely how you got there, let alone why."

"Certainly no general [Slim] ever did more with less; in every way, he was one of the great captains."

"...a reluctance to recognise that today's safety and comfort were bought fifty years ago by means which today's intelligentsia find unacceptable, and from which they wish to distance themselves."

"Brewing up is not merely a matter of infusing tea; making the fire comes into it, and when you have lit and maintained fires in the monsoon, you have nothing more to learn. That came later; at Meiktila it was a simple business of assembling bamboo slivers, igniting them (no small thing, with Indian “Lion” matches which invariably broke and sprayed the striker with flaming phosphorus), and bringing about a gallon of water to the boil in the section brew-tin. This was a jealously-guarded article, about a foot cubed, made by cutting a compo ration tin in two and piercing the rim for a handle of signal wire. The casting in of the tea leaves from the section box was the crucial thing, followed by the ceremonial dropping in of two broken matchsticks to attract stray leaves; remove the tin from the heat, invite the guests to scoop out the brew with their piallas [“mugs” in Urdu], and tea was served, each man adding sugar and condensed milk to taste."

"There are few sounds as menacing as a bayonet being fixed."

"It is a habit of great countries of imperial pretensions to take the future for granted, as the Romans did in Trajan's day, and as Britons, with a few far-sighted exceptions, did at Victoria's jubilees, and Americans do now."

"He [Anthony Crosland] and his Socialist fellow-theoreticians did a terrific job in degrading scholastic standards in the name of equality, which meant dragging down the good to the level of the mediocre."

"[re Princess Diana's death] I wondered at the time, what had happened to the moral fibre of the island race - the stiff upper lip, if you like - to make them behave like professional mourners howling for hire. The Prime Minister was proud. I was ashamed."

"...and I haven't got to the bloody Japanese yet, with their poisoned stakes and booby traps and nasty habit of using prisoners for bayonet practice and no-surrender valour and fighting ability to match our own...almost."

"But with today's mammoth papers the poor boobs have to write at ten times the length their subject is worth, and apart from over-padded news we have the curse of modern journalism, the proliferation of the commentary, the background exposition, the in-depth analysis, the "think-piece", all adding up to an indigestible stream of crap which no one wants to read, and no one, to judge by the mechanical repetition and weary rambling, wants to write either."

"War is men killing each other, often at close quarters, and doing their damnedest to stay alive. And until you have done that, against a capable enemy, you don't have any idea of what it's like, honestly. Mr Spielberg may splash the screen with gore, and publicists may declare: "You are there!", but you're not. You're snug in a cinema watching a load of crap performed by actors. Hand-to-hand fighting is different, and it's no place for a woman. (It's no place for anyone, including me, but for a woman least of all.)"

"...the leaders of an independent Scotland will be only too happy to trade away that independence in return for admission to the fleshpots of Brussels for themselves and their families, goes without saying; they have the example of Westminster to copy."

"Few things infuriate the ordinary citizen more than liberal attitudes to crime and criminals. And not only infuriate, but offend against justice, common sense, and fair play. The ordinary citizen is neither a brute nor a sadist; he is humane (as most liberals are not), he is compassionate when it is called for, leans over backwards to be fair, and is ready to give a second chance. But he knows the difference between right and wrong, and has an instinctive sense of the difference between right and mere legality. He believes that wrongdoing should be punished with appropriate degrees of severity; deep in his understanding lies a feeling that eye for eye and tooth for tooth is not without merit, and that the punishment should fit the crime."

"The stark truth, of course, is that they have not abolished the death penalty at all. They have merely transferred it from the guilty to the innocent - and incidentally ensured that many more violent deaths occur."

"That political correctness should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country's decline."

"I never said, and don't believe, that all Germans are Nazis. I'm just pretty sure that they're all Germans, and that is the point."

"Does he A N Wilson] really believe that there is no nostalgia for the triumphant days of the Third Reich among that proud and valorous race, or that they have forgiven and forgotten that in two great wars the English-speaking people beat the hell out of them, humiliated them, conquered them?"

"...after careful observation of our own children and their playmates at the toddler stage, that you will see in the nursery every crime in the book except sexual assault: GBH, attempted murder, theft, blackmail, extortion, lying, fraud, false pretence, menacing, putting in fear, robbery with violence, conspiracy, mayhem - the whole Newgate Calendar is on show, and if sex and high treason are exceptions it is only because the little blighters haven't got round to them yet."

"For some reason which escapes me, there seems to be a feeling now that we have a moral duty to interfere in foreign disputes, and tell other countries how they should govern themselves, especially if so-called democracy is thought to be in danger."

"But not half as angry, I dare swear, as our forefathers would be if they could see the betrayal, by worthless politicians, of the country they worked so hard to build, and the surrender of the precious freedoms won by better men at Gravelines and Trafalgar and Waterloo and Flanders and Alamein and in the skies above Kent."

"One way or another, the question whether Britain remains a free nation or becomes the vassal of a totalitarian Europe will be settled soon, and those who oppose our further integration would do well to remember, and proclaim as widely and as loudly as possible, the unashamed dishonesty that has characterised the pro-European movement from the beginning. Not since Lenin and Hitler cast their obscene spells has there been a political campaign so blatantly deceitful. In 1972 we were assured it was merely a Common Market, and that no political union could be envisaged: it is now shamelessly admitted that this was untrue, that political union was the aim from the start."

"What matters above all is sovereignty, the right to make our own laws......the right to remain independent of the unworthy, undemocratic, unprincipled, authoritarian, bureaucratic rabble of Brussels."

"Certainly we tend to be resistant to change, on the whole, but that is because we have learned the hard way that change for its own sake is not a good idea, and that if something works more or less satisfactorily, it is best not to alter it without long and careful thought."

"First, I hope to see the British public resist the propaganda onslaught of the pro-Europeans, in which the broadcast media, led by the BBC, have shown themselves willing tools of the government, and vote a resounding "no" in the referendum, if and when it comes."

"[Re the Piat anti-tank weapon] Like many British inventions, it looked improbable, unwieldy, and unsafe - and it worked."

"Gravity, muzzle velocity, density, intensity, one for his nob, and bullshit baffles brains! There - into the breach, old Whatsit, and if all else fails we'll fix a bayonet on the bloody thing and charge! Fire at Will, he's hiding in the cellar, the cowardly sod!"

"Whoever said that Russia was an enigma inside a something-or-other inside something else, was dead right. I don't understand the place yet."

"We all have kindly impulses, fostered by two thousand years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have the killer instinct, too, the murderous impulse of the hunter..."

"No doubt newspaper reports and broadcasts had encouraged us, civilian and military, to regard him [the Japanese] as an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone Age; the experiences of Allied prisoners of war demonstrated that the reports had not lied and reinforced the view that the only good Jap was a dead one."

"A Gurkha subaltern whom I met later told me that commanding a platoon of them was like leading a group of perfectly-disciplined ten-year-olds, and I believed him."

"No one underestimated Jap: he might be a subhuman creature who tortured and starved prisoners of war to death, raped women captives, and used civilians for bayonet practice, but there was no braver soldier in the whole history of war, and if he fought to a finish..."