Screenwriters From The United States

"Culture is worth a little risk."

"I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension."

"The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level."

"A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul."

"The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you."

"We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards."

"The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube."

"[The launch of Apollo 11]: For at 8.9 seconds before lift-off, the motors of Apollo-Saturn leaped into ignition and two horns of orange fire burst like genies from the base of the rocket. Aquarius never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his measure. Because of the distance, no one at the Press site was to hear the sound of the motors until fifteen seconds after they had started. Although the rocket was restrained on its pad for nine seconds in order for the motors to multiply up to full thrust, the result was still that the rocket began to rise a full six seconds before its motors could be heard. Therefore the lift-off itself seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate, and was then pursued by flames. No, it was more dramatic than that. For the flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete, two underground rivers of flame which poured into the air on either side a hundred feet away, then flew a hundred feet further. Two mighty torches of flame like the wings of a yellow bird of fire flew over a field, covered a field with brilliant yellow bloomings of flame, and in the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville's Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville's Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air. And still no sound. Then it came, like a crackling of wood twigs over the ridge, came with the sharp and furious bark of a million drops of oil crackling suddenly into combustion, a cacophony of barks louder and louder as Apollo-Saturn fifteen seconds ahead of its own sound cleared the lift tower to a cheer which could have been a cry of anguish from that near-audience watching; then came the earsplitting bark of a thousand machine guns firing at once, and Aquarius shook through his feet at the fury of this combat assault, and heard the thunderous murmur of Niagaras of flame roaring conceivably louder than the loudest thunders he had ever heard and the earth began to shake and would not stop, it quivered through his feet standing on the wood of the bleachers, an apocalyptic fury of sound equal to some conception of the sound of your death in the roar of a drowning hour, a nightmare of sound, and he heard himself saying, 'Oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God!' but not his voice, almost like the Italian girl saying fenomenal, and the sound of the rocket beat with the true blood of fear in his ears, hot in all the intimacy of a forming of heat, as if one's ear were in the caldron of a the vast burning of air, heavens of oxygen being born and consumed in this ascension of the rocket, and a poor moment of vertigo at the thought that man now had something with which to speak to God – the fire was white as a torch and long as the rocket itself, a tail of fire, a face, yes now the rocket looked like a thin and pointed witch's hat, and the flames from its base were the blazing eyes of the witch. Forked like saw teeth was the base of the flame which quivered through the lens of the binoculars. Upwards. As the rocket keened over and went up and out to sea, one could no longer watch its stage, only the flame from its base. Now it seemed to rise like a ball of fire, like a new sun mounting the sky, a flame elevating itself. [...] Now, through the public address system, came the sound of Armstrong talking to Launch Control. He was quieter than anyone else. 'Inboard cutoff' he said with calm in his voice."

"What is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems?"

"The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation."

"The people who worked for NASA ... were ... part of that vast convocation of Americans, probably a majority, whom one saw in New York only on television."

"Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough."

"There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce."

"With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance."

"One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness — the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others."

"This is D.J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam."

"You're contending with a genius, D.J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip."

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."

"The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today … We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination."

"The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."

"Socializing on the internet is to socializing, what reality TV is to reality."

"Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand."

"Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama? That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I would use is, if you're driving in your car and you're listening to a rock 'n' roll station on the radio and a song comes on, and in the song you hear elements of jazz and folk and you hear strings in there … it's not necessary to answer the question, "Is this jazz, is this folk, or is this rock?" before you decide to listen to it and like it or not."

"People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn."

"I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. " You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?" and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like."

"The worst crime you can commit is telling the audience something they already know, in any fashion, even for a moment."

"The problem I had when I wrote The Social Network was that this thing that’s supposed to bring us closer together is pushing us further apart. It gives everyone the impression that everyone else in the world is having a better time, and that if you are not cataloging your life, then you’re not really living it. People are going to show you only pictures of themselves having a great time at the best party with the coolest people eating, for some reason, avocado toast. They’re also not going to experience empathy. When we’re a little kid on a playground and say something mean to another little kid, we see in their face what we did, and we feel bad because of it. On social media, it’s more like yelling at another driver from your car. People are developing a chemical addiction to their phones. A gambling addict feels that rush of dopamine and serotonin not when they win but when the roulette wheel is spinning. When kids stick their hand in their pocket to get their phone and see if someone has commented on the photo they posted, they get that rush of serotonin and dopamine. It’s a big deal. And now, when we talk about our concerns with Facebook, we’re talking about the power that it has to disseminate misinformation and disinformation. We’re never going to put this genie back in the bottle, but surely we can decide that lies are bad."

"Decisions are made by those who show up."

"IF YOU ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone."

"I guess we were kinda poor when we were kids, but we didn't know it. That's because my dad always refused to let us look at the family's financial records."

"It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man."

"If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did.""

"MAYBE in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Basically, it's made up of two separate words — "mank" and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind."

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they'd never expect it."

"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."

"IF YOU GO through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance."

"TO ME, it's a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, "Hey, can you give me a hand?" you can say, "Sorry, got these sacks.""

"With great power comes great responsibility, Stan Lee once wrote. Spidey's credo articulates the basic premise of every superhero universe, including ours. But Lord Acton wrote that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The tension between those two truths is where the drama comes in. My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight."

"Believe me, no one wants to finish this book more than me."

"My reading of history has shown me that simply 'being a good man' is not enough. That there are many kings who are good men and yet bad kings. And even good kings sometimes make disastrous decisions. So government is complex, politics is complex."

"Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be."

"I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there are elements in the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction."

"There are many different kinds of writers, I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know before the drive the first nail into the first board what the house is going to look like and where all the closets are going to be, where the plumbing is going to run, and everything is figured out on the blueprints before they actually begin any work whatsoever. And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it. They sort of know what seed they've planted — whether it's an oak or an elm, or a horror story or a science fiction story, but they don't how big it's going to be, or what shape it's going to take. I am much more a gardener than an architect."

"As a writer, my goal, (which I'm never going to achieve, and I know that, and no writer can achieve that,) but my goal is to make you almost live the books... I want you to fall through that page and feel as if these things are happening to you."

"I've been killing characters my entire career, maybe I'm just a bloody minded bastard, I don't know, [but] when my characters are in danger, I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps."

"Sure. Some of the reviews have been very flattering, but the series is not finished yet. The end needs to be as strong as the beginning."

"Back at the Philadelphia Worldcon (which seems a million years ago), I announced the famous five-year gap: I was going to skip five years forward in the story, to allow some of the younger characters to grow older and the dragons to grow larger, and for various other reasons. I started out writing on that basis in 2001, and it worked very well for some of my myriad characters but not at all for others, because you can't just have nothing happen for five years. If things do happen you have to write flashbacks, a lot of internal retrospection, and that's not a good way to present it. I struggled with that essentially wrong direction for about a year before finally throwing it out, realizing there had to be another interim book. That became A Feast for Crows, where the action is pretty much continuous from the preceding book. Even so, that only accounts for one year. Why the four after that? I don't know, except that this was a very tough book to write -- and it remains so, because I've only finished half. Going in, I thought I could do something about the length of the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, roughly 1,200 pages in manuscript. But I passed that and there was a lot more to write. Then I passed the length of the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was something like 1,500 pages in manuscript and gave my publishers all around the world lots of production problems. I didn't really want to make any cuts because I had this huge story to tell. We started thinking about dividing it in two and doing it as A Feast for Crows, Parts One and Two, but the more I thought about that the more I really did not like it. Part One would have had no resolution whatsoever for 18 viewpoint characters and their 18 stories. Of course this is all part of a huge megaseries so there is not a complete resolution yet in any of the volumes, but I try to give a certain sense of completion at the end of each volume -- that a movement of the symphony has wrapped up, so to speak."

"Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends."

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real... for a moment at least... that long magic moment before we wake. Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smoke-stacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the song the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever, somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La. They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to Middle Earth."