Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Do I want to start my own production company? No, I doubt it. I'm too old for that. I don't want to start anything.
Writers vary tremendously. Was it Tom Wolfe who stood up or was it [Ernest] Hemingway who had to stand up? I don't know.
We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.
Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.
I'm sufficiently independent to know that I can live well and comfortably all the rest of my life whether I'm rejected or not.
Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man, that state is obsolete.
In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.
Over the long haul I'd say that most directors I've worked with have been pretty sensitive to the quality of the interpreted scenes.
I'd rather go along with this sense of illusion that I'm a neutral beast going along through life doing everything that's preordained.
I don't have any system. I dictate a lot, through a machine, and I also have a secretary. But I used to type just like everybody else.
The tendency when you dictate is to overwrite, because you're not counting pages, you don't really know what the hell the page count is.
How can you put on a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?
I don't enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it's successful.
The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.
I choose to think of tv audience as nameless, formless, faceless people who are all like me. And anything that I write, if I like it, they'll like it.
I couldn't direct because I'm too impatient and I couldn't put together a package because I don't understand money. I'd rather just do what I'm doing.
According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the Earth. It is man’s prerogative - and woman’s - to create their own particular and private hell.
If you have the temerity to try to dramatize a theme that involves any particular social controversy currently extant. . . then you're in deep trouble.
I don't think it's man's function to write. I don't think it's a normal thing like teeth-brushing and going to the bathroom. It's a supered position on the animal.
You see. No shock. No engulfment. No tearing assunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning.
You can become much more independent, much more courageous with a bank account. And also, much more independent and self-reliant when you know you have money behind you.
Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn't embrace it. I succumbed to it.
I remember the first sale I made was a hundred and fifty dollars for a radio script, and, as poor as I was, I didn't cash the check for three months. I kept showing it to people.
I miss the comraderie of live television - the fact that you were on the set, you worked closely with the director and the cast, that I miss. But, no, I'm happy, I'm happy doing film.
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
The writer's no different. When he's rejected, that paper is rejected, in a sense, a sizeable fragment of the writer is rejected as well. It's a piece of himself that's being turned down.
Somehow, some way, incredibly enough, good writing ultimately gets recognized. If you're a really good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read.
I don't believe in reincarnation. That's a cop-out. . . . I anticipate death will be a totally unconscious void in which you float through eternity with no particular consciousness of anything.
I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot - we inhale from our 'Bartlett's.'
Now death is with us in such abundance and hovers over us in so massive a form that we don't have time to invent a mythology, nor is our creativity directed toward same. Now it's to prevent death.
The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.
If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.
But it makes you wonder, doesn't it? Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street? A rather good question to ask - particularly in The Twilight Zone.
Someplace between apathy and anarchy is the stance of the thinking human being; he does embrace a cause, he does take a position, and can't allow it to become business as usual. Humanity is our business.
If the producer doesn't like you, consequently he reads the script with a very negative view. But I wouldn't preoccupy myself with that, I don't give a damn. You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and whatall.
I'd love to be able to write an in-depth piece of what causes men like [Richard] Nixon and [H.R.]Haldeman and [John] Ehrlichman and all the rest of them not only to run, but what causes us to vote for them.
There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.
In terms of screenwriting adaptations it's trying to cut out stuff that's extraneous, without doing damage to the original piece, because you owe a debt of some respect to the original author. That's why it was bought.
I'm a Western-cultured man who subscribes to the ancient saw that men do not cry, I don't cry either. I'll go to a movie, for example, and not infrequently something triggers the urge to weep, but I don't allow myself.
Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting in the Twilight Zone.
I would guess that Ray Bradbury would be equally resentful of what they did with Illustrated Man, which, you know, took a central idea thesis of his and pissed all over it - made it into one of the worst movies ever made.
It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.
I'm an affluent screenwriter and all that - I'm a known screenwriter, but I'm not in the fraternity of the very, very major people. I would say a guy like Ernie Lehman, William Goldman, and a few others are quite a cut above.
The major difference frequently is in time. The motion picture, for example, gives you considerably more freedom of expression than does the confined thirty-minute television show. But in essence, they're not that dissimilar.
Most shows, buying shows, have a standard fee for the first shot of the writer and if you have a very militant agent, I suppose he might jack it up four percent or something. But in essence, you sell for what is the going rate.
You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead—your next stop, the Twilight Zone.
I just want people to remember me a hundred years from now. I don't care that they're not able to quote any single line that I've written. But just that they can say, "Oh, he was a writer." That's sufficiently an honored position for me.
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices . . . . And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
I think I'd rather win, for example, a Writer's Guild award than almost anything on earth. And the few nominations I've had with the guild, and the few awards I've had, represented to me a far more legitimate concrete achievement than anything.
I find dictating in the mass media particularly good because you're writing for voice anyway; you're writing for people to say a line and, consequently, saying a line through a machine is quite a valid test for the validity of what you're saying.