Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you are a fan, you have two choices. Go to the stadium, where you see the whole beauty of it. Or stay at home, watch the beautiful moves on the slo-mo cameras. Don't go to the cinema, because you won't see it there.
We're all one thing, like cells in a body. 'Cept we can't see the body. The way fish can't see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.
Why are we now going into space? Well, why did we trouble to look past the next mountain? Our prime obligation to ourselves is to make the unknown known. We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.
It's so easy today to get swept up in celebrity fixation and materialism and searching for some validation outside of yourself when we know it's really found within and through meaningful connections with other people.
At an early age, I knew there were a lot of things I couldn't do. My father was a doctor, and my mother was a teacher. I knew I wasn't good in numbers, and I knew I wouldn't work well in overly structured environments.
It's only recently women got to be action heroes on TV. Progress is slow, and often non-existent. There's plenty of cool comics with female characters... But all it takes is one Catwoman to set the cause back a decade.
the only real rule I know in writing is, Don't be boring. Sleeping people don't read a word you write or hear a thing you say. How can they? They are asleep. So don't put anyone to sleep, and you will probably do okay.
My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.
I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.
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.
I never studied directing and I never really thought about doing it, and then I just found myself in that situation and tried it. I like to be observing everything else, and I get self-conscious in front of the camera.
When Brad [Pitt] responded [to Allied], suddenly what was impossible became possible, which was great. But along the way, whenever I told the story, it had an affect on people. At its core, this was an effective story.
There's something about living in the country that I think makes you inventive, because nature is full of miracles and wonder and surprises, and if you don't have much money, you have to make things if you want things.
Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.
Humans know when it's not a good story. Unless you do this for a living, you may not know exactly why you don't like a story, but you can't fool an audience ever. They know when you have it and they know when you don't.
Contemporarily, we struggle with people worried about representation sometimes. It's a burden, as artists, that we take on that limits the work. It limits the characters people play. It limits the roles they want to do.
The spirit of my films... I always want them to be kind of contrarian. Meticulous on the one hand, but unbelievably sloppy and careless on the other. I guess that's what you get anyway, if you're not planning very much.
If I hope to survive, I have to acknowledge the natural selection that goes on when film stocks and cameras are eliminated from the world. And film viewers won't want to watch the same thing over and over again from me.
It's also important that I, or [Producer] Karen Pritzker, also say that this film [ "Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope"] is not going to singlehandedly solve crime and poverty, or make big changes.
I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population - and gave birth to the whole world. Without them writing and being directors, the rest of us are not going to know the whole story.
So, is Hollywood anti-religion? Not in my opinion. But unlike, say, politicians and preachers who talk faith before going off to speak in tongues to their mistresses, Hollywood just doesn't wear its faith on its sleeve.
I think I've had a lot of experience with watching other people shepherd my ideas with the 'Saw' films. They made four 'Saw' movies without me. I never really had a protective or fierce policy towards that. I let it go.
Being a black lesbian myself, I roll my eyes a little bit when I see black lesbian characters on shows where it's purely there for decoration. You can just hear it in the writers room... 'What if we make her a lesbian?'
There are a couple of specific things about the show [Into the Badlands]. We didn't want to do a contemporary show, which is always "Chinese cop comes to New York, teams up with racist cop, together they fight crime..."
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.
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis are larger than life. They just are. They sucked all the oxygen out of a room: they're icons; they loom large in our imaginations. But the truth of the matter is both women were diminutive.
You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.
I'm a black woman every day, and I'm not confused about that. I'm not worried about that. I don't need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don't feel disempowered as a black woman.
You have to have more people who don't look like you in the writers room. I try to have some people who don't look like me in my writers room. I think it's important to have a group of voices, of people who can dissent.
A commission and an original are two different things, and both have their virtues and vices. A commission is a bit more collaborative, in that you outline the story that you think should be told, and then you write it.
I've spent three hours with Snoop Dogg, talking about how he loved [Peaky Blinders series]. And David Bowie loved it. The late Leonard Cohen was a fan. It struck a chord with various people that I didn't think it would.
If someone busted into your house and robbed you, would you then forgive them if you found out they were a veteran? Of course not. So why are we forgiving McCain for selling out his country by supporting the Bush agenda?
Here's my unsolicited advice to any aspiring screenwriters who might be reading this: Don’t ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition. No one else is capable of doing what you do.
Japanese horror films take the business of being frightening seriously. There is no attempt at postmodernism or humour. They are incredibly melancholy, with a strong emotional core, while remaining absolutely terrifying.
I remember going to McDonald's for the first time probably when I was in college. And then I remember going and visiting a friend in Wyoming, and he said, 'We're going to do something special. We're going to McDonald's.'
The hypocrisy and false piety of the deniers aside, the relationships of gays have no effect on heteros. Especially all the heteros who've done such a marvelous job of debasing marriage on their own all these many years.
Until politicos take a true stand in defense of marriage by proposing an anti-adultery amendment to the Constitution, stop demonizing gays and lesbians when the one debasing your marriage is the individual in the mirror.
I still have my first 'Black Lightning' that I got way back in the day, and my first 'Steel.' And I proudly display those comics, by the way. I have a lot of comics, but those are among the ones that mean the most to me.
The reality of space travel I think is somewhere in the middle. We will get there, it will be hard, it will take a long time, and in the end, the most extraordinary thing we will find when we get there will be ourselves.
That girl will rain destruction down on you and your ship. She is an albatross, Captain. Way I remember it, albatross was a ship's good luck, 'til some idiot killed it. [to Inara] Yes, I've read a poem. Try not to faint.
Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton she's a competent politician, which means she seldom says anything in less than three paragraphs. So people like the guy who just goes, "Nuh-uh, no puppet, no puppet, you're the puppet."
I have abused language. I love it, and I abuse it... I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register.
I do think it's important for black writers to show that we too can make it into the mainstream. Growing up, I didn't just watch The Cosby Show, I watched Growing Pains and Family Ties too. We can tell those stories too.
The film industry sees the writer as fungible: The thinking goes, As long as we have Brad Pitt and all this money, we have a great film! No, you need a writer with voice and an engaging story, or what you have is a bomb.
It took me little more than two years to complete my film, 'Woody Allen: A Documentary.' I conducted hours of filmed interviews with Woody, who put forward no ground rules about questions I could ask, or topics to avoid.
What does it mean to be human, and what is at the human heart, and is there a soul, or is that all there is? Can an artificial being be intelligent? Is 'intelligent' the definition of humanity, or is it something deeper?
America is a country that prides itself on being able to identify a 'straight shooter' or 'the genuine article' when it comes to our leaders. As a nation, we can 'feel it in our gut' when someone is giving us a bum steer.
The truth is, there's an information blockade in America, and it must be broken. In order to find crucial facts, numbers and outside perspectives, a person must spend an hour searching and cross-searching on the computer.
Some of the key components, we wanted it to be so far into the future that you weren't talking about our time. I was joking that the AMC cinematic universe is after the zombie apocalypse by hundreds and hundreds of years.