Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It takes me awhile to find something that I'm passionate about. I'm reading a lot and thinking a lot, and torturing myself a lot because I'm feeling really guilty for not writing something today.
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.'
Peaky' is a very personal thing for me because it's based on stories that I was told as a kid by my parents. At the very beginning, I tried to have other writers involved but it just didn't work.
Writers do the self-censoring before they even get to the studio executive, because they know the film will not run that gauntlet. They, because they want to get their films made, they censor it.
I just like the fact I can make a film which might give comfort to some people who think they are the only crazy person in the world and suddenly they see there are two crazy people in the world.
If I grew up in a different background, I could see myself getting a gun and shooting an abortionist. That's my job, to imagine what could happen, what can make people go in different directions.
The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it, America would be grim indeed.
You have to do a version of somebody that's the essence of Paterno. I think that's what Al is so great at. You have to create a man, a life, and the emotions that go with it. He's truly brilliant.
It is interesting to be here and to see that for certain actors they have to live in a way that you think of nobody living anymore except for in small towns. They have such elaborate double lives.
I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.
With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.
The passionate ones, the ones who go after what they want, may not get what they want, but they remain vital, in touch with themselves, and when they lie on their deathbeds, they have few regrets.
Following a pre-cellphone world of children on an adventure is incredibly appealing for me. These are the kinds of movies I fell in love with and made me want to be a filmmaker in the first place.
Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.
Of course, the strippers also take pains not to appear too innocent, valorous, or bookishly inclined. (In direct opposition to the Swayze Mandate of 1987, everybody puts Baby in a goddamn corner.)
My mom had grown up in the South. Louisiana and Georgia. She had been deeply religious. Baptist, then Mormon. She had worked for the U.S. military. She had voted for Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior.
I never really knew that I would be a lifer of strong female characters, but that seems to be the drops I'm being given, and I'm very happy for them. Hopefully, 'Divergent' will be the next thing.
To be different is not necessarily to be ugly; to have a different idea is not necessarily to be wrong. The worst possible thing is for all of us to begin to look and talk and act and think alike.
The present blitz about drugs - I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago -- throw them in the cage - as if that's the whole answer. And it's not the whole answer.
Hopefully we have a slightly different vibe, but also East Side is where a lot young people live. It is a really fun, trendy, funky neighborhood, and it is ripe for satire, that area specifically.
There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.
I had this spooky psychological thing about 'The Piano' before it began, which was how everybody was going to go nuts on the set. Because a film tends to set up the way people are going to behave.
I like some time away to recharge the batteries, not only physically, but emotionally so that I get to the point where I'm just dying to direct again and then that's the right time to do it again.
A lot of directors don't know what they want to do. Every director I've seen that was a good director that I've admired knew exactly what he wanted to do. They didn't sit there and think about it.
I didn't know it at the time, but Hitch didn't want to talk to me - he hated meeting with people he might have to reject. As it turned out, someone, maybe his agent, insisted that he interview me.
In Psycho IV, the time is five years after III, and Norman is out of the hospital. He's a married man, and he's finally learned how to love somebody and have natural sex without killing his lover.
It's really hard in this day and age, with radio and MTV being so consolidated, to get new music out there. I think we've become a really legitimate, viable avenue for getting new music out there.
The networks have a particular agenda, a particular model and structure. It doesn't have anything to do with content. This is not a dis on them - they are a business model, run by business people.
As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.
I think there's just too much comedy. Sometimes I get requests from people: 'How do I get into comedy?' And I always say that what we need is more people in health care. And less people in comedy.
Television can become a bit of a treadmill for directors. You come in, nobody knows you, the actors are already doing what they're doing, and you're just one of a number of directors who comes in.
As you submit to God more and more, you will get accustomed to being nourished by the power of truth. He is so holy that He cannot lie. God reveals His truth to His people through the Holy Spirit.
There's something that's so basically corrupt about any system in which a good and fair profit is not enough. There has to be more, every year, every quarter, because your stock price has to rise.
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.
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.
Some of the storytelling we did in 'Battlestar Galactica,' to graft that onto 'Star Trek,' it would have required changing the entire format of the show and, really, a different taste of the show.
I started off in this business in 1998, and I didn't fit in. There was no place for me, and I always felt like an oddball. Nobody really understood my work or what I wanted to do in my references.
I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.
I think that's the problem with kids now. Everything is manufactured. And then they're sitting there watching the television, where all the work is done for them. Radio made me use my imagination.
I shoot very little film. If you just do coverage you're shooting any number of potential films instead of just one, and I was shooting just one specific film. Film is cheap but time is expensive.
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
People assume thoughts and processes about you that may have nothing to do with you whatsoever, but they make political assumptions and assertions about who you are based on your choice of partner.
There were always people like the pope. They serve a certain function, of course. They subsidize us. But, they don't create anything and they must never be allowed to stop the artist from creating.
I've learned one thing about life. We're a good deal like that ball, dancing on the fountain. We know as little about the forces that move us, and move the world around us, as that empty ball does.
There's nothing quite as good as folding up into a book and shutting the world outside.If I pick the right one I can be beautiful, or fall in love, or live happily ever after. Maybe even all three.
I don't have a style. I wouldn't say I have a style as a writer, either. I know people have said "This is what he does," but when I'm writing, I don't think about that. I don't think about a style.
The only thing that's different about doing a superhero show is that you can have your hero do things that a normal cop in a procedural can't do. But the structure of the storytelling is universal.
If you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there.
In the past, a great library was the result of librarians functioning as guardians of culture, tending and caring, selecting and recommending works that maintained and nurtured a cultural heritage.