Screenwriters From France

"It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones."

"Women believed in death. Without exception. It was part of their makeup. Whereas men refused to face up to it. Not only death, in fact, but life, too: a man, learning that his wife or girlfriend is pregnant, reacts like some beast of the field - "I can't believe it's true!" - while women look at the same situation as either happy news or a momentary inconvenience."

"The fact that a woman you love reaches a point in the relationship where she ceases to love you, and despite that you can never bring yourself to scorn or despise her, is very rare indeed."

"It's not doubt that drives people crazy, it's certainty that does."

"Could you love a woman you didn't respect? Could you worship someone without believeing in her? Could you be madly in love with a woman you didn't admire? Well, you could. Not only that, it might be better that way. Easier. It took Paul almost forty years to learn that carnal platitude. Nevertheless, he always took Sonia to dinners where, sooner or later, her stupidity would explode, with the result that brighter souls would inevitably pick up on it right away and cast a sympathetic, albeit ironical, look in his direction, which only excited him all the more."

"Paul had always thought that women were never more serious than when they were naked."

"Desire, even the basest, kind, required the notion of futurity if it was ever to come off. A man without a future, a dying man, was no longer desirable. And however stupid such a reaction might have seemed, Paul knew that if the situation was ever reversed, he would feel the same way about the woman. Desire would have turned into compassion. Which is tantamount to saying that desire would vanish into thin air."

"Lying stimulates one's imagination and ingenuity."

"One is never free except in relation to someone else. And when, the relation is based on happiness, it allows the greatest freedom in the world."

"Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the “real” as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called “realist” novels — they’re nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all."

"I don’t search for exactitude in portraying people. I try to give to imaginary people a kind of veracity. It would bore me to death to put into my novels the people I know. It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the “fronts” people assume before one another’s eyes, and the “front” a writer puts on the face of reality."

"For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."

"Love is worth whatever it costs."

"Enter Chanda, the multilingual call girl who can seduce in Hindi, Tamil, English and French. With her bee-stung lips, unusual face and refreshing lack of acting guile, Kalki Koechlin imbues the part with a touching fragility."

"It's all a part of this world where we're all kind of mixing a lot, and… in that way we're all a bit confused about who we are, where we belong, where's home, and … who is important to us…"

"I think the chemistry we have is that we both think very dark when it comes to stories."

"I wanted to kind of make sure that people know that I'm here to stay, because this is home, and I am born here — I'm not a foreigner in that sense."

"Obviously I think I've been very lucky, to start off with such a good break, and to have a film that not only was a hit but where I didn't have to compromise … in terms of doing a mindless movie — it was also a movie, for me as an actor which was very fulfilling…"

"The clown company played by Atul Kumar, Kalki Koechlin, Sujay Saple, Neil Bhoopalam, Namit Das and Puja Sarup are outstanding in their role[s]. This is just outstanding casting by the director and The Company Theatre."

"Dev.D is a tryst with milestone cinema, reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann's Shakespeare-shaken-and-stirred in Romeo and Juliet. Kashyap, however, gets even more adventurous and adds a progressive flourish to both the plot and the characters which are played to perfection by the three lead players. If Mahi and Kalki are riveting new finds, assured of a long innings in cinema, then Abhay Deol adds a whole new meaning to the term "Unconventional Hero"."

"Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it."

"It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most."

"Ce qui remplit le temps c'est vraiment de le perdre."

"It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"There is no vacation from love, it doesn't exist. Love, you must live it fully, with its boredom and all, there is no possible vacation from that."

"Writing is not speaking. It's silencing yourself. It's screaming without noise."

"Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it."

"Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn’t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny."

"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."

"Have you noticed that life, real honest to goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?”"

"Il y aura toujours un chien perdu quelque part qui m'empêchera d'être heureux."

"Mourir, ce n'est rien. Commence donc par vivre. C'est moins drôle et c'est plus long."

"On ne peut pleurer pour le monde entier : C'est au-delà des forces humaines. Il faut choisir !"

"When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past — and when you're seventy, nearly all of you."

"Our father who art in heaven Stay there And we will stay here on earth Which is sometimes so pretty"

"I am what I am I was made this way When I want to laugh Yes I shriek with laughter I love those who love me It's my fault If they're not the same That I love everytime I am what I am I was made this way What more do you want What do you want from me"

"It's terrible the faint sound of a hard boiled egg firmly cracked on a tin counter it's terrible this faint sound when it stirs the memory of a starving man"

"An orange on the table Your robe on the carpet And you in my bed Sweet present of the present Coolness of the night Warmth of my life."

"Oh, the little man wanted me—Roman Polanski. Very dwarfish creature with a high giggle. After a take, he wouldn't say, "Cut." One would just hear a "Tee hee hee." [...] Roman presented everything in [such] a calm, matter-of-fact way that the creeping terror just builds. It's sheer genius on his part. It's a very quiet movie where a door creaking can unnerve one. There's a lot of dark comedy in there, too. he was a very careful director—explained everything, multiple takes, very demanding, very appreciative when one got it right. Loved to talk old movies with me."

"Gunson added that it was false to claim, as the present district attorney’s office does in their request for my extradition, that the time I spent in Chino was for the purpose of a diagnostic study."

"On February 26 last, Roger Gunson, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case in 1977, now retired, testified under oath before Judge Mary Lou Villar in the presence of David Walgren, the present deputy district attorney in charge of the case, who was at liberty to contradict and question him, that on September 16, 1977, Judge Rittenband stated to all the parties concerned that my term of imprisonment in Chino constituted the totality of the sentence I would have to serve."

"33 years ago I pleaded guilty, and I served time at the prison for common law crimes at Chino, not in a VIP prison. That period was to have covered the totality of my sentence. By the time I left prison, the judge had changed his mind and claimed that the time served at Chino did not fulfil the entire sentence, and it is this reversal that justified my leaving the United States."

"Whenever I get happy, I always have a terrible feeling."

"Berlin was great. It’s a new generation. If you continue to hate, you are entering into the same philosophy that began the war. You have to look forward at people and new times."

"You know, whenever you do something new and original, people run to see it because it's different. Then, if it happens to be successful, the studios rush to imitate it. It becomes commonplace right away. But it's been like that before, I think. Now, the stakes are so gigantic that they cut each other's throats. So if most of the films are failures, then those that succeed so spectacularly, so commercially, become the norm. It's like a roulette for the studios. The problem with it is that it becomes more and more of a committee. Before, you dealt with the studio. It had one or two persons and now you have masses of executives who have to justify their existence and write so-called "creative notes" and have creative meetings. They obsess about the word creative probably because they aren't."

"It's already getting more and more difficult to make an ambitious and original film. There are less and less independent producers or independent companies and an increasing number of corporations who are more interested in balance sheets than in artistic achievement. They want to make a killing each time they produce a film. They're only interested in the lowest common denominator because they're trying to reach the widest audience. And you got some kind of entropy. That's the danger; they look more alike, those films. The style is all melting and it all looks the same. Even young directors — for most of them, their only standard of achievement is how well their films do on the first weekend or whatever. It worries me. But then, from time to time, you have a film like The Usual Suspects or.... I'm trying to think of something American with some kind of originality... Pulp Fiction."

"My films are the expression of momentary desires. I follow my instincts, but in a disciplined way."

"Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater."

"If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children."