Screenwriters From England

"Christ asked for everything he got."

"And so, at the age of thirty, I had successively disgraced myself with three fine institutions, each of which had made me free of its full and rich resources, had trained me with skill and patience, and had shown me nothing but forbearance and charity when I failed in trust."

"In becoming the universe God abdicated. He destroyed himself as God. He turned what he had been, his true self, into nullity and thereby forfeited the Godlike qualities which pertained to him. The universe which he has become is also his grave. He has no control in it or over it. God, as God, is dead."

"Dusk is the time when men whisper of matters about which they remain silent in the full light of the sun."

"Rose girl, bearing your posies, What are you coming to sell? Is it yourself or your roses, Or yourself and your roses as well?"

"Gentlemen can now only behave as such, or be tolerated as such, in circumstances that are manifestly contrived or unreal."

"Nothing really wrong with him—only , but that's the most fatal complaint of all, in the end."

"Love is not about finding someone to live with, it's about finding someone you can't imagine living without"

"Wastemen are aptly called so because they waste our time. Waste our energy. On purpose. They sell us dreams and then take them away, so we end up chasing them as if it was ever a reality."

"It was the kind of lovemaking that has you feeling more beautiful the next day; walking smugly with a sway, hips swishing, with a nimbus of power and joy around you."

"He wasn't my type. At all. And yet there was something about him that made me want to be his type."

"You never really know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice."

"Pieces of me fell into place. I was growing into what I should be. We were growing. It wasn't as if our love built me, it's that it galvanized me, making me stronger because he saw me fully, the best and worst parts."

"Thank you for letting me love you. Thank you for loving me back. Thank you for staying, I know it was hard sometimes. I hope you now live free."

"Time was constructed with love in mind. / Time and love are intertwined, they are both measures of life, they are the two clocks."

"Time and love are intertwined, they are both measures of life, they are the two clocks. And, for love to operate as it should, it is imperative that the timing should be right."

"Time was constructed with love in mind."

"They enjoyed the glamour but not the gore, not knowing that the gore was what gave the glamour its gleam."

"I couldn’t believe I was letting my ex-boyfriend risk the security of my bag. Money before honeys. No. Men weren’t honeys. Scratch that. Fees before The D. Contracts before Phone Contacts. Those were all terrible and I cannot believe someone is paying me to write. I opened up Instagram to distract myself."

"I didn't like doing things I wasn't good at, but it turned out I loved learning how to love with him."

"Eros pulled Psy so close to him there was no real demarcation between her heartbeat and his, and when they kissed, with Olympus beneath their feet and the sky surrounding them, Eros felt as if what they had was not just above the world as they knew it, but beyond it, out of its touch, its scope, itself a propelling energy that catapulted and vacuumed them into their own universe."

"The smile he gave her was mainstream, pop, radio-friendly. The smile he’d given me was the single released after an artist had established themselves, found their voice, could speak directly to their target audience. The smile he’d given me had more R&B to it."

"Can we start the show?” I smiled into the mic and adjusted the headphones on my ears, slid a knob on the mixing desk down, and switched to a soft neo-soul instrumental, turning it down low."

"Aren’t you tired of mandem using your hearts for sport? I ask this now because I heard there’s a new player in town. And I won’t lie, he’s kind of cute too. A snack. A beverage. But you guys know that too much coffee is bad for you, right?"

"Love is the prism through which I view the world. I truly believe it binds and propels us. This isn’t a naive denial of the darkness that we know exists in the world; rather it is a refusal to allow the devastation, the horror, or the heartache to consume us."

"Psy was smiling. It was warm and soft, and to Eros it looked like the perfect place to lie in and just be."

"And then suddenly I feel tears in my eyes. I bring up to cover my face and when I speak, my voice is all high-pitched and wobbly. "I feel like shirt." "Oh, Charlie." Tori puts down her crisps and pulls me into a hug, running one hand over my back. "It's okay." I shake my head into her shoulder, trying not to get tears all over her dressing gown. "It's not okay... it's really not okay..." She lets me cry into her shoulder for a few minutes before she speaks again. "I think you need to talk to him.""I don't know what to say," I whisper. "Just something. Anything." "He hates me." "That's untrue." "He's angry." "That's temporary." "I don't know what to say." "It doesn't matter what you say," she says. "You just have to say something.""

"You will never sense the theatre. This is not "acting" but reality. The hand of God presses itself firmly on your shoulder. You realise how truly noble, in spite of all its shortcomings, is this lump of clay called "man." Your soul will be full of gratitude that such men existed, and that they were Englishmen—that the inherited nobility of the race survived at such a moment. These men bring the war back to us."

"He did not write the play with the commercial management in mind. He did not write it with a view to peace propaganda; nor did he write for any glorification of war. He wrote it to satisfy himself alone. He wanted to place on record a simple story of war before the memory died. He did not write it with the possibility of an audience in mind, and when one wrote in that way it was easy to tell the truth as one saw it with one's own eyes. One well-known gentleman said it was false; another described it as crude to the last detail; while another writer in a Scandinavian paper said it was the best play Sheridan had written since the War. (Laughter.) He felt that some of his critics had looked from an angle instead of straight from the front. He sincerely resented any statement that it was a disparagement to the soldier to say that the War broke men's nerve. It was the fighting man he had striven to reverence and remember."

"In the early part of the century, audiences possibly listened more than they do today. In Journey's End the verbal construction of the play is very specific, as it is in this play What Every Woman Knows]. I found that if one hadn't committed oneself at the very beginning to the style as laid down by Sherriff, one would reach an emotional hiatus. The style is similar to Barrie's in its literateness. Playing Stanhope was one of the most uplifting things in my career. The Boys' Own part of me could identify with him, and his first entrance was almost the peak of the part. For 15 minutes they've all been talking about Stanhope so in that first moment one had to present that caring about the front line the clinical awareness of the dangers of laziness, of guns being rusty and things like that. It was emotionally and intellectually exhausting to build to that pitch of mania each night, but it did give one's spine a tingle to be able to indulge all the better parts of oneself, to think that one's being a hero."

"Journey's End came at psychologically the right moment. The war had been over for 10 years. What plays there had been about it had tended to be heroic and romanticised – the reality was too near and horrific for close contemplation. Journey's End, set in a dug-out in the front line just before a German offensive, was a simple statement of how men lived after four long years of war... They wait in their dug-out, enduring lice, the stench of earth, ordure, corpses and cordite, knowing but never admitting that their chances of survival are minimal. They talk of insensitive generals but never of the political stupidity that led them to be there. They regard the Germans in their dug-outs on the other side of the barbed wire of No-Man's-Land as being as unfortunate as themselves. They yearn for the sight of the New Forest and the Sussex Downs. To that 1929 audience they must have seemed the incarnation of the lost generation."

"The King had honoured his play [Journey's End] that night by being present at the Prince of Wales Theatre. In handing over the manuscript of the play he hoped that it might benefit the great cause to which he gave it."

"In his play Mr. Sherriff had given the world a great thought, a great message, and, she believed, the profound hope that some day by the exposition of the facts there would be abolished the evil institution of war. (Cheers.) ... Mr. Sherriff had taught them what moral and spiritual degradation could come from international warfare. She would like him in his next play to reveal all the horror of that industrial warfare which condemned in times of peace more than a million men in this country to tramp the streets vainly looking for work."

"Some plays drift into neglect from sheer familiarity. The success of R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End in 1929 still casts its long shadow: everyone has heard of the piece, and probably caught up with it on radio. And it is invariably used as a reference point for subsequent British war plays."

"It makes you think of the old days. We all knew these fellows, didn't we? This is so real."

"“Then what happened?” I asked. “The Russian stopped calling, more important, the bills weren’t paid—I guess he either went broke or another oligarch had him killed.” Probably the latter, I thought. That was the way most business disputes were settled in Russia."

"I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and handsaws would have once been the most highly paid members of their community and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders."

"“Not all death warrants are signed by judges or governors,” I explained. “This one was a prenup agreement.”"

"Like the old virologist had said—sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences."

"I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty."

"“Twenty-five years ago he was executed.” It shocked me. “Executed?” I said. “For what?” The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. “The usual—corruption on earth.” “I’m sorry, but what exactly does ‘corruption on earth’ mean?” He laughed. “Pretty much whatever we want.” Nearly all of his team found it funny too. “In this case,” he continued, “it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal.”"

"I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom it’s a terrifying thing to behold."

"DNA doesn’t lie."

"I went to open the front passenger’s door. It was locked and she indicated the rear seat. Apparently it was okay for a Muslim woman to lead a man to his death but not to share the front seat with him."

"“A few years after the bonfire of the mob came for him and his family. Like he said, it’s always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people. Out of his parents and five kids, he was the only survivor. “He passed through three camps in five years—all of them death camps, including Auschwitz. Because it was such a miracle he had survived, I asked him what he had learned. “He laughed. ‘Nothing you call original,’ he said. Death’s terrible, suffering’s worse, as usual the assholes made up the majority—on both sides of the wire. “Then he thought for a moment. There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he’d learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you—just listen to them.” Whisperer turned and looked at me. “So that’s what you meant, huh? You’ve been listening to the Muslim fundamentalists?” “Yes,” I replied. “I’ve heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They’ve been burning books, Dave—the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I’ve been listening to them.” “And you don’t think we have—the people in Washington?” He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent and I think he genuinely wanted to know. “Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut.”"

"We’ve got one huge advantage—people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute."

"Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere, but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough intelligence."

"In the Army, as in life, sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people’s attention."

"Apart from opium poppies and hemp plants, kidnappings for ransom had become about the only growth industry in Afghanistan."

"The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the number of people used."