Screenwriters From The United States

"At this point, I’ve come to realize that where you are, the space you’re in, what you wear, this one body that you’re in for this life — those of course matter because you are really here, you’re not just an idea in your head. And there is something profound about noticing again and again that you’re here."

"I think, ultimately, my character comes to think that the desire for a shared dream, a shared fantasy, a shared world, was really an attempt at a recreation of a certain kind of childhood pain. Our relationships are built on our first experiences with our parents, so the idea that longing and fantasy and boundarylessness had been established then and didn’t quite function in an adult landscape was — I mean, it’s still quite slippery for me to talk about in this way, and in fiction I felt like I had a shot. You don’t have to be articulate, which I think is important — you can let characters be dumb and stumbling. That is what art can do that talking about art can’t."

"I guess my favorite thing in the world is when I look at a piece of art, or read a story, or watch a movie where I walk away feeling like "Oh my god — I have to do something, I have to make something or talk to someone — things are not the same anymore" — and so I try to make work where you come away with that feeling. It's like, yeah, you're thinking about what you just saw, but even more than that — you feel able, you feel like, kind of propelled."

"I pretended that I was pausing before telling him about the secret feeling of joy that I hide in my chest, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to notice that I rise each morning seemingly with nothing to live for, but I do rise, and it is only because of this secret joy, God's love, in my chest. I looked down from the sky and into his eyes and I said, It wasn't your fault. I excused him for the cover and for everything else. For not yet being a New Man. We fell into silence then; he did not ask me any more questions. I was still happy to sit there beside him, but that is only because I have very, very low expectations of most people, and he had now become Most People."

"That is my problem with life, I just rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down like I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest."

"I wanted to make the movie feel like life feels to me — and life feels both sad and dark and confusing and more than hopeful — it feels like something totally incredible could happen at any moment and with no explanation."

"I think there’s something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It’s impossible to articulate, and it’s happening now, almost like a perverse secret. . . . That’s always sort of fascinating to me."

"It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound."

"I’m totally not kidding. … Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing."

"No one's keeping track — no one's making of an archive of these "unimportant" things, you know… but now we have an archive … and in a way, the second there's many, it becomes proof of something, something that's so unspecific — that it's — that it's lively — to me that's really alive — that kind of half nauseous, half beautiful feeling."

"Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful. Except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it. Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be."

"They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love and they worked together to fill these rooms with high-end, consumer-grade equipment. It was a tight situation. The next sudden move would have to be through the wall."

"I'm who I was waiting for. I didn't make it."

"Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus, and it's hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy, and more than anything else in the world, you wanna get off. And the only reason in the world you don't get off is it's still fifty blocks from where you're going. Well, I can get off right now if I want to. Because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it's still the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. Whenever I've had enough, it's my stop. I've had enough."

"I found an old baby picture of me... and it was somebody else - not me. It was somebody pink and fat. Who never heard of sick or lonely. Somebody who cried and got fed. And reached up and got held. Slept whenever she wanted to just by closing her eyes. Somebody who mainly just laid there and laughed at the colors waving over, round her head. And chewed on a polka-dot whale. And woke up knowing some new trick nearly every day. Rolled over and drooled on a sheet. Felt your hand pull the quilt back up over me. That's who I started out. And this is who's left."

"Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things—racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness—but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open."

"I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum."

"Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well...Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew."

"Wickham is not an upwardly mobile community. It's dingy and gray as only a mill town can be. The streets are the color of a shoe bottom, and the only way to tell the difference between the bars and the homes is to look for the neon signs in the windows. The roads and sidewalks are uneven, the tar cracked and pale. Many of the people, especially the workers as they trudge home from the mills in the dying light, have the look of those who've long ago gotten used to the fact that no one remembers them. It's a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because at least they confirm that time is actually moving on."

"My dad went through a sea of deaths. The oldest of six, he buried his four younger brothers and four of his children. Yes, I was it. His philosophy after grieving was to laugh. To try to bring some joy to others, because life is just so hard sometimes. Because it ends. My father also had a huge amount of dignity. This Mark Twain quote sums up the way my father and mother felt about life: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." As crazy and dark as I would imagine some of these stories sounded, I am very proud of the life I have led so far. I have a lot of love in my life. And a lot of laughs. And I wish that for you all. I wish that even for the guy in the audience with his arms folded."

"What I wanted to share were my feelings about how humor gets you through this life and through all the dark times. For me, it's occasionally irreverent and immature humor. But funny is funny. Like my friend Rodney Dangerfield used to say, "It is what it is." As I was adding those words earlier in this book, I was inspired to call my friend David Permut, who was Rodney's dear friend as well. I don't call David that much — good friend that I am — and I called him on his cell, unblocked. David answered the phone: "You're not going to believe this." I said, "What did I do? Have one of those psychic moments that I'm always bragging I have?" He continued: "Bob, I am standing at this moment on Rodney's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame." He'd had a meeting to go to and visited Rodney's star because he had a half hour to kill. He hadn't been there since the day he and I were there for the ceremony when Rodney got the star. The morning he got some "respect." A moment of synchronicity like that tells me that everything is where it's supposed to be. We all have them; they give us chills and let us know we are truly in the present. The key is to remember the moments. Don't take them for granted. I learned from everyone I treasure — my daughters, my parents, Don Rickles, all my friends and relatives who went through huge losses our entire childhoods — that humor, however you define it, gets us through the saddest of times."

"I'm always amazed when I go to do stand-up dates and the ad in the paper says, "For Mature Audiences Only." Nothing could be more immature than my stand-up. It's all derived from the silly humor my dad instilled in me. Poop and penis jokes. I really should be billed in perpetuity as "For Immature Audiences Only." I'm in the process of evolving past that. Could take a while."

"The Internet has opened the door wide to the world of haters. I'm a viral kind of guy so I know that being on Twitter itself is just asking for it. But thankfully, I see a lot more lovers than haters. And the haters I get, if I happen to see them I block 'em. I just don't need to do negative anymore. When you perform live, eventually you're going to make direct eye contact with that one guy in the audience with his arms folded staring back at you. But I process it differently now. Maybe I misread that guy. Maybe he was just cold or checking his armpits for sweat or just had a really bad day. And the great thing is, if I ever need a counterpoint to the arms-folded guy, I can just go right to my Twitter account and read, "@bobsaget is my favorite person in this entire world." And then at the last minute I can decide not to post it."

"As I wrote this book, a lot of people asked me if I had a ghostwriter. The answer is yes. It was Ernest Hemingway. And my house is full of his ghost vomit and urine. Hemingway said something that helped me get through this, my first book: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.""

"I don't call her my middle child, I call her my center child, Because the world revolves around her."

"I've banged half the girls in this room, and that is f**kin' not true. I haven't banged anyone here. I've put my pinky in your butts, couple of you."

"As a kid I often heard from my mom, as well as from the teachers in every school I attended, that I needed to behave myself and watch how I spoke. Apparently I was a mischievous little bastard. By the time I started out in stand-up at seventeen, I was careful about my language; this helped me get on television shows and go on the road opening for musicians like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and Kenny Loggins. But one day in my early twenties, I snapped. I didn't want to disappoint my mom, but I couldn't take the censorship of it all. Some of the comedians who fascinated me the most — Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor — had also felt oppressed by the things you could and couldn't say in public."

"In my career I've had the fortune of being able to work continually in radically diverse creative worlds. By day I've done some of the most family-friendly TV imaginable. Then, often in the same day, I've gone onstage in the L.A. comedy clubs and whirled off with an adolescent's delight about my grandma's projectile diarrhea. That in itself could, by many psychiatrists' standards, be a bit of a call for help. I never do it to shock anyone, even though people have sometimes thought of me as a shock comic. If it is a through-line or a constant to what I do, it's not something I'm proud of. But I'm not ashamed of it either. It's more of a handicap. Or, depending on your perspective, a gift. It's what I used to think of as my mania. Now I've come to embrace it. You have to love yourself. But not in a movie theater, because they will tabloid your ass."

"That would be a good public service announcement for Nickelodeon: "Hi, this is Bob Saget. Don't f*ck that sh*t. Stay in school. And read!""

"I get vaccinated five to six times a day and I feel great!!"

"Full House gave me Tourette's. We would be on the set, and, action! "Okay, Michelle, you can't have a horse in the house--" and, cut! "Cock sh*t f**k!""

"People ask me what my favorite episode of Full House is; it was the last one!"

"This woman woke up to see me and John Stamos banging on her windows. She must have thought she died and went to sitcom hell."

"If you laugh at that, you lower the bar, and I will limbo under it because I am a f*cked-up guy!"

"Kids, do not f*ck that sh*t; you'll get an infection."

"This is unusual and upsetting but we got some news -- we got some news during the show that -- that Robin Williams has passed away. (some in the audience audibly gasp in disbelief) And by the time we air the -- we tape these shows a few hours early -- and by the time you see this now on TV I'm sure that you'll -- you'll know. I'm sorry to everyone in our studio audience that I'm breaking this news. This is absolutely shocking and -- and -- and horrifying and so upsetting on every level and we're at the end of the show and it just felt like we needed to just acknowledge. Obviously, we don't know much yet. We know that this has happened and we're absolutely stunned."

"I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it too."

"Now that this mess is almost behind me – I just have one last request: HBO, when you make the movie about this whole NBC late night fiasco, I’d like to be played by Academy-Award winning actress Tilda Swinton."

"Before we end this rodeo, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can't say about NBC. To set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, the Late Night show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I have worked with NBC for over twenty years. Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we're going to go our separate ways. But this company has been my home for most of my adult life. I am enormously proud of the work we have done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible. Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the medium. But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and, for seven months, I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I've had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-Eleven parking lot, we'll find a way to make it fun. And finally, I have to say something to our fans. The massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the Internet, and the fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain to be in our audience, made a sad situation joyous and inspirational. To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism - it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. As proof, let’s make an amazing thing happen right now. Here to close out our show, are a few good friends, led by Mr. Will Ferrell…"

"Love means never having to say you're sorry."

"They glanced at one another like tigers taking measure of a menacing new rival. But in this kind of jungle you could never be sure where the real danger lurked."

"It takes someone very special to help you forget someone very special."

"Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me."

"Mal Hombre: God damn it, Sergeant. I thought you were a professional soldier. Sergeant: I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, and I was gonna lose my man. Mal Hombre: This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant? Sergeant: Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper 'dirty laundry'?"

"Black sergeant: You a reporter? Herr: No, a writer. Black sergeant: Careful. You can't use no eraser up where you wanna go."

"Soldier: You guys aught to do a story on me suntahm. Herr: Why should we do a story about you? Soldier: 'Cause I'm so fuckin' good, 'n' that ain' no shit, neither. Got me one hunnert 'n' fifty-se'en gooks kilt. 'N' fifty caribou. Them're all certified."

"There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years."

"I think that Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods."

"War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway."

"Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there."