SCHMUCKS WITH UNDERWOODS

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Quotes About Hollywood, Writers, Writing, The Creative Life,
and Related Subjects, Compiled by the Members of The PAGE BBS
(Thanks to friend Bob Claster in Hollywood for letting me know about this.)

From http://httpsrv.irt.drexel.edu/faculty/ina22/cliplib/clip-quotes.htm

"Every ten minutes there needs to be some kind of 'whammo,' or action beat, a gunshot, an explosion, a car chase or a fight, something that provides an adrenalin rush and gives the movie a sense of forward motion." Between the "whammos," he said, are "zingers," usually funny lines that ease the tension. With that formula, Silver maintains, it's possible to play an audience like "an orchestra."

--Joel Silver, quoted in Studio Briefing

My dream was to work in the industry for five decades. As I started my third decade, I was a failed playwright but one with TV shows on the air, giving me a steady salary and residuals. A nest egg is a good thing to have when you are writing plays. It also reminded me of why I always go on strike with the Writers Guild and carry a picket sign.

--Garry Marshall

My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on "ideas." Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the "how" above the "what" but do not let it be confused with the "so what." Rely on the sudden erection of your dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.

--Vladimir Nabokov

Unlike serial killer profiling, writing is a very depressing and lonely profession.

--Darin Morgan

A lot of successful people in Hollywood aren't good listeners.

--Ron Lux

Marty, if the man and woman walk away together at the end of the picture, it adds $10,000,000 to the box office.

--George Lucas to Martin Scorsese

The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.

--Alfred Hitchcock

Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I'm a fucking actor! They hand me a script. I act. I'm here for entertainment, basically, when you whittle everything away. I'm a grown man who puts on makeup.

--Brad Pitt, star of "Seven Years In Tibet"

As smart a curmudgeon as H. L. Mencken was, his most-quoted cynical observation is dead wrong. Plenty of people go broke every year underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The names of those people are immortalized in the credits of the nine out of ten TV series that disappear before their promos are dry.

--Harry Shearer

Tell it with pictures. Direct it like you were making a silent.

--John Ford to Elia Kazan

The rather amazing thing is that the NBC executives think they're the brilliant geniuses, not the people who write and produce and perform in "SNL," "Seinfeld," "Frasier" or any of the network's other good shows. Littlefield wouldn't know a good joke if it fell on his head from a three-story window.

--Tom Shales

Hollywood is high school with money.

--Martin Mull

You have to accept that the movie isn't going to be as good as you wanted it to be.

--David Lean

First rule of screenwriting: You will be asked for changes as long as there is time, Xerox machines and actors.

--Dennis Foley

Only in America would someone spend his own money to run for president only to achieve his real ambition-- to host Saturday Night Live.

--Steve Forbes

The difference between Hollywood and the Boy Scouts is that the Boy Scouts have adult leadership.

--Dennis Foley

Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.

--Billy Wilder

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

--Alfred Hitchcock

I finished Hitler today.

--Phyllis Cannon

An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.

--Billy Wilder

Quit now, you'll never make it. If you disregard this advice, you'll be halfway there.

--David Zucker

The only one I know who can read a book on a computer is the guy who wrote it.

--Stanley Crouch

Nepotism is the only disease you can die from not having in Hollywood. .

--Dennis Foley

"You have to remember that a television is a nice piece of furniture that lights up."

--Fred Allen

Nothing's funny before noon.

--Ian Abrams

Bring a child into the world, write a book, put together a machine, build a chair-- those who create have the feeling to play a role bigger than themselves.

--Jacques-Yves Coustea

In the past artists represented things they had seen on earth, things they liked seeing or might have liked to see. Today they reveal the relativity of visible things; they express their belief that the visible is only an isolated aspect in relation to the universe as a whole, and that other, invisible truths are the overriding factors. Things appear to assume a broader and more diversified meaning, often seeming to contradict the rational experience of yesterday. The artist strives to express the essential character of the accidental.

--Paul Klee, Berlin 1920

Writers create a fabulous script, and it exists out there. It is just a matter of words making it to the screen without someone screwing it up.

--William H. Macy

For about an hour, I was trying to remember who Madonna reminded me of. It was another familiar entertainment female, I was sure of that, but who? The pale complexion. The ovine expression. The childish voice... finally I realized I was thinking of Lambchop. Unfortunately, Shari Lewis was not manipulating Madonna, so she was far less expressive than Lambchop.

--Charles Schlotter

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

--Paul Rudnick

I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper.

--Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in Gone With The Wind.

I read not only for pleasure, but as a journeyman, and where I see a good effect I study it, and try to reproduce it.

--Lawrence Durrell

(Some writers) are better read than met.

--Saul Bellow as quoted in The Authors Guild Bulletin

WRITER: I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind! Just when exactly does an actress decide they're HER words she's saying and HER thoughts she's expressing?

ACTRESS: Usually at the point when she has to rewrite and rethink them to keep the audience from leaving the theater!

WRITER: It's about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto!

--Joseph L. Mankewicz, ALL ABOUT EVE

I do not understand why directors feel they have to be writers. They are two distinct talents.

--Joe Eszterhas

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

--H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

And Hollywood proves once again... what the American theatergoer wants to see is something new, fresh, and original... that's been done before successfully.

--Jack Sowards

"The lyrics of pop songs are so banal that if you show a spark of intelligence, they call you a poet."

--Paul Simon

That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind...

--Vita Sackville-West

If I had money, I'd never write.

--Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Our words must seem to be inevitable.

--W. B. Yeats

JOEY: I never really thought about the writers. The scripts just kind of come to my house.

--"Friends" episode written by Michael Borkow

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.

--David Frost

People hate me because I am a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius.

--Jerry Lewis

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have the guts to be gay, go into the arts.

--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those ten years I'd like to spend in New York.

--Harry Ruby

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

--T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Television is, if not our society's blood, its lymphatic fluid. As it changes, its communicative power inevitably shifts the course society takes, in greater or lesser ways. The quiz show scandals brought on a sea change in television, evolutionary, true, but arguably as important as anything until the arrival of cable.

--Mark Tuttle

You should go to visit your agent. If your agent has empty bookshelves, it's a bad thing.

--Bonnie Nadel, Book Agent

Once you accept the idea that says because you get paid $200,000 to write a script and the director gets $500,000 to direct it, he's $300,000 smarter than you are, then Hollywood becomes a very amusing place to work.

--John Gregory Dunne

In show business, nothing is impossible except for an honest accounting of profits.

--Mark Evanier

When you start writing you're 98% pure writer and 2% critic. After you've written for a length of time, you've learned a great deal about your craft, and you've become 2% pure writer and 98% critic. It's like writing uphill.

--David Westheimer

Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.

--Robert Bresson

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

--Gene Fowler

It is a happiness to dream.

--Edgar Allen Poe

I loved Feydeau's one rule of playwriting: Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B. Knock Knock. Enter Character B.

--P. Guare

Everything happens at parties.

--Jane Austen

To bring a film to the screen is to wrestle with monsters dressed as clowns.

--David Thomson

Hollywood exists to make the American public hate foreigners, prepare for war, love the police and to encourage Yuppies to have babies, which were also the goals of the film industry of the Third Reich.

--Alex Cox

All television is children's television.

--Richard P. Adler

Poetry should be as cold and compassionate as the dawn.

--W. B. Yeats

Lindsay Doran (producer), James Schamus (co-producer), Ang Lee (director) and I had met previously this month to discuss the latest draft of the script, which is what we're all here to work through... Lindsay goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be nice to me.

--Emma Thompson, from "The Sense & Sensibility Screenplay & Diaries"

In a perfect world, writing a good script would earn good money, and writing a great script would earn great money. And in a perfect world, Joe Ezsterhas would be a prison guard.

--Jeff Cohen

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.

--David Brinkley

Art is a moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

--Rita Mae Brown

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

--Graham Greene, "The Third Man"

Masturbation is the thinking man's television.

--Christopher Hampton

There have been writers who lost me somewhere between their pages and my trips to the dictionary... I just never returned to the book. The dictionary turned out to be more interesting, and if I came across a word I didn't understand... Voila!... the definition of the word was right there next to it.

--Jack Sowards

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Everything else-- just tear that motherfucker apart.

--Richard Price

Eszterhas always promises you a sermon and gives you a peep show. (Whereas Oliver Stone promises you a peep show and gives you a sermon.)

--Charles Schlotter

Studies by foreign countries have shown that all-day [television] transmission has been a major cause of obesity and a plunge in productivity level.

--Information Minister Mohamed Rahmat of Maylasia

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.

--Meredith Wilson

Writers always get upset when I change their material. They're just upset because I've shown that, in ten seconds, I can come up with something better than what they spent six weeks on. I can do that with anything that's ever been written. The first idea off the top of my head is ten times better than anything anyone ever tried to write for me. When I agree to do some writer's piece of shit, he'd damn well better not complain when I improve it. He should get down on his knees and kiss my feet that I've turned his shit into gold.

--Jackie Gleason

There was a time when making 'Barney Miller' a hit on the air was my life. I cared about nothing else. That was all I was concerned with. And I told my wife and I told my children if it costs me my relationship with my family, I'm committing five years of my life to making the best television show I can possibly make. Whatever it costs, under any circumstance. And I hocked my house, and I gave up my salary and I did everything to give the show a chance to start going. And that's what you have to do.

--Danny Arnold

Hollywood is the only town where you cannot fail. You can only quit trying.

--Dennis Foley

When I leave these boy writers to themselves, you can see what happens. Then they do a little boy show, and then they get fired.

--Roseanne

The fact that Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli had their Grammy taken away while the ghostwriter and editors who put a number of Ronald Reagan's tired fantasies into complete sentences continue to think of themselves as respectable practitioners of a noble calling is yet another in a series of indications that the world of rock music has higher ethical standards than the publishing industry.

--Calvin Trillin

It is not unusual even for people who like to refer to themselves as journalists--people who would presumably enjoy blowing the whistle on some luckless manufacturer who tried to pass off as American something assembled in Taiwan--to sign their names to books they didn't write a word of.

--Calvin Trillin

So the couch potatoes have produced their first genius.

--Sarah Kerr on Quentin Tarrantino in the New York Review

If you've lain in a lonely hotel in America with a remote control in your hand and picked your way with the zapper through the swamp [of pay TV], you've found out what a cultural desert is.

--Clive James

Filmmakers, if you must get a life, get someone else's!

--Daniel Krause

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around.

--Herman Mankiewicz telling Ben Hecht about Hollywood

We could live like counts... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

--William Faulkner, considering an offer to write for Hollywood

There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.

--W. Somerset Maugham

They have followed their usual procedure and handed my treatment over to several other people to make a screenplay out of it. By the time they are ready to shoot it may have been through 20 pairs of hands. What will be left? One shudders to think. Meanwhile, they have paid me a lot of money...

--Aldous Huxley

I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. 'Out there' I called it. You want to know what 'out there' means to me? Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.

--Dorothy Parker

MGM bore me when I see them but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.

--Evelyn Waugh

Listen carefully, shake your head thoughtfully, then leave them in the dark... where you found them.

--Jack Sowards on dealing with development executives in notes meetings

Even in Southern California, the film community are a people apart. They are like monks in a desert oasis, their lives revolving around a few shrines-- half a dozen studios, two hotels, one restaurant; their sacred texts are their own publicity and the local gossip columns... Artists and public men elsewhere live under a fusillade of detraction and derision; they accept it as a condition of their calling. Not so in Hollywood, where all is a continuous psalm of self-praise.

--Evelyn Waugh

Two movie producers meet on the street. 'How's your picture doing?' asks the first. 'Excellent.' 'Only excellent? That's too bad.'

--Leo Rosten

Los Angeles had been on fire for three days. As I took a taxi from the studio, I asked the driver, 'How's the fire doing?' 'You mean,' said the Hollywoodian, 'the holocaust.'

--Gore Vidal

News that a group of stars and caliphs have been engaging in orgies is received casually by the movie dinner parties. Information from a qualified source that a certain great star is perverse in her love making and will engage in amour only in a bathtub full of warm milk, or that a local Casanova has taken to substituting electrical appliances for phallic attentions makes the smallest of ripples. You will see the lacteal siren and the sexual Edison at dinner the next evening and there will be no nudging or winking.

--Ben Hecht

They scowled at dialogue, shuddered at jokes, and wrestled with a script until they had shaken out of it all the verbal glitter and bright plotting. Thus they were able to bring to the screen evidence only of their own "genius."

--Ben Hecht on working with some directors

A critic is someone who knows the way but cannot drive the car.

--Kenneth Tynan

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

--Lillian Hellman

You gotta take the sour with the bitter.

--Sam Goldwyn giving Billy Wilder his philosophy of life

Todd interfered in every conceivable department of the production, not excluding my own; indeed, so far as I know, he is now rewriting the picture as he goes along, grinding the crank, building the sets, unnerving the actors, and generally qualifying as an up-to-date Leonardo da Vinci. It's inaccurate to describe his cyclonic conduct as energy or vitality-- it's much more a violent frenzy I'm sure the head-shrinkers could classify.

--S.J. Perelman on Mike Todd, during the making of "Around the World in 80 Days"

Putting it as briefly as possible, a Nodder is something like a Yes-Man, only lower in the social scale. A Yes- Man's duty is to attend conferences and say 'yes.' A Nodder's, as the name implies, is to nod. The chief executive throws out some statement of opinion, and looks about him expectantly. This is the cue for the senior Yes-Man to say 'yes.' He is followed, in order of precedence, by the second Yes-Man-- or Vice-Yesser, as he is sometimes called-- and the junior Yes-Man. Only when all the Yes-Men have 'yessed,' do the Nodders begin to function...

--P.G. Wodehouse, on the Hollywood hierarchy

One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good, nobody can touch Him.

--John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983

My chief memory of movieland is of asking in the producer's office why I must change the script, eviscerate it, cripple and hamstring it? Why must I strip the hero of his few semi-intelligent remarks and why must I tack on a corny ending that makes the stomach shudder? Half of all the movie writers argue in this fashion. The other half writhe in silence, and the psychoanalysts couch or the liquor bottle claim them both.

--Ben Hecht

Nulla res melior spectaculo est.

--Wendy Wasserstein

You don't grow your hair 35 feet long and hang it out of a tower just because you've read "Rapunzel."

--Charles Schlotter on whether TV promotes real-life violence

A good hook in a bad script is, in some ways, like an ugly guy with a beautiful girl on his arm. It doesn't make the guy look any better, we just want his girl.

--Charles Zucker

Writers are lucky. Whatever the mood, no matter the longing, the writer can use his words to connect himself to any world he wishes to visit.

--Alan Zweibel from "Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner: A Sort of Love Story."

There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who love quotations love meaningless generalizations.

--Graham Greene

I hate quotations; tell me what you know.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Grammies are to music what professional wrestling is to combat.

--Charles Schlotter

If the Marquis de Sade lived today, he would not be sent to prison for his perverse visions... he would be given a three picture deal at any major studio.

--Jack Sowards

Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.

--Rod Serling

Don't you know the finest things in the world have been written on an empty stomach?

--Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman, Jr., "Sunset Boulevard"

A writer's inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.

--Pierre Beaumarchais

If publishers were obstetricians, most of us would be dead at birth.

--Gordon Basichis

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

--Thomas Mann

To me, that's disaster. Who's the authority in that case? I've seen that, and I think it's utterly unendurable, and usually the actor's wrong. Generally speaking, actors are not writers. I try not to change the script because I think you get into a funny area there. If you start opposing the writer, you lose any sense of discipline, and half the time you're opposed because you aren't actually prepared to face the problem. You can fool yourself so easily that way. I mean, if you've taken the part because the writing is good, then it's your business to find a way to play it, not change it because it suits your whim. To me, there's nothing to take the place of good dramatic writing. Nothing.

--John Hurt, replying to the question "How do you feel about American stars' power to change the script?"

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for a few friends. Finally you do it for money.

--Jean-Baptiste Moliere

There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could... be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the "not un-" formation out of existence.... (One can cure oneself of the "not-un-" formation by memorizing this sentence: "A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."

-- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

--Somerset Maugham

Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.

--Mark Twain

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.... Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under- Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has the curious feeling that one is not watching a live human but some kind of dummy....

--George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

If Hitler's still alive, I hope he's out of town with a musical.

--Larry Gelbart

Jesus, where the hell is everybody when they first deliver the typing paper? Where are all the "helpers" when those boxes full of silence come in? Blank. Both sides. No clues, no instructions enclosed on how to take just twenty-six letters and endlessly rearrange them so that you can turn them into a mirror of a part of our lives. Try it sometime. Try doing what I do before I do it.

--Larry Gelbart

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.

--Norman Mailer

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

--Karl Kraus

I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.

--John Irving

A script is like a detailed blueprint for building a motion picture. You have to keep it simple enough for the contractors, electricians, plumbers, glaziers, painters, and landscapers to understand. You never know when one among them might be a functional illiterate.

--Jack Sowards

You could get started writing in all sorts of different ways. And then you wrote a while. And met some of the writers. The good ones and the bad ones. And they all had tinkertoy souls. You knew it when you got into a room with them. There was only one great writer every 500 years, and you weren't the one, and they most certainly weren't the ones. We were fucked.

--Charles Bukowski as Henry Chinanski in South of No North.

No. No. No. You've got it wrong. Jerome Kern wrote, "dum dum DA dum." My husband wrote "Ol' Man River".

--Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein responding to someone who credited Jerome Kern for writing "Ol' Man River."

Writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon one can neither resist nor understand

--George Orwell

It is the writer's business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.

--Chekhov

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

--Saki

If immoral works of literature exist, they are works in which there is no plot.

--Cesar Pavese

A journalist is stimulated by a deadline: he writes worse when he has time.

--Karl Kraus

Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden.

--Karl Kraus

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.

--Dr. Johnson

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

How much more flattering to see a critic turn disparaging from malice and spite than lenient from cliquishness.

--Andre Gide

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought; there is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

--Victor Hugo

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you're allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style.

--Fred Astaire

Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.

--George Herbert

If it sounds good, it is good.

--Duke Ellington

I just don't want to act on TV, and I don't think TV wants me to act in it, either. It's a mutual decision.

--Tom Arnold

Look at the rejection this way, you're one 'no' closer to a 'yes.'

--Kerry Feltham.

The world is full of too many contradictions and not enough contraception.

--Robert Newcombe

I have always maintained that... if you were not born Jewish, and you are in Show Business, then you will be Jewish by the time you're forty.

--Jack Sowards

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.

--William Sansom

The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge), but simply written; it's a dreadful, awful fact that writing is like any other work.

--Janet Frame

Today is a dawdly day. They do seem to alternate. I do a whole of a day's work and then the next day, flushed with triumph, I dawdle....The crazy thing is that I get about the same number of words down either way.

--John Steinbeck

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

--Anne Rice

If you have a skeleton in your closet, take it out and dance with it.

--Carolyn MacKenzie

If you're an artist, you've got to prove it.

--Laurence Olivier

Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.

--Francisco Goya

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work

--Gustave Flaubert

We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

--Henry James

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

--Cynthia Ozick

One of the signs of Napoleon's greatness is the fact that he once had a publisher shot.

--Siegfried Unseld

You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If somebody drives it off a cliff, that's it.

--Rita Mae Brown

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

--Edgar Allen Poe

It's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the DT's begin.

--W.C. Fields

To escape criticism - say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

--Elbert Hubbard

Advice to Film Writers

1) Think visual.

2) Don't give anybody anything too complicated to say to anybody.

3) When you get to page 115, you're done, whether you're done or not.

--Dan Jenkins

It would never occur to a filmmaker to go to Atlanta and tell Coca Cola how to make a soft drink.

--Billy Wilder

Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to stay a writer.

--Harlan Ellison

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

--Arthur Miller

The whole purpose of communication is to send messages which are not fully predictable.

--Jeremy Campbell

I've only written a tenth of what I know-- and they're already screaming.

--Albert Camus

It is the task of the scenarist to invent little pieces of business that are so characteristic and give so deep an insight into his creatures, that their personalities clearly and organically unfold before the eyes of the audience so that the latter feel that the actions of these people are contingent upon their characters, that there exists some kind of a logical fate, and that nothing is left to mere accident or coincidence....

--Ernst Lubitsch

Real writers don't cry, son. Our inner child is drowning in an ocean of unshed tears.

--Jack Sowards

I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.

--Chinese proverb

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

--Benjamin Franklin

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

--Catherine Drinker Bowen

The writer is by nature a dreamer-- a conscious dreamer.

--Carson McCullers

I shall live bad if I do not write and I shall write bad if I do not live.

--Francoise Sagan

Writers have an island, a center of refuge, within themselves. It is the mind's anchorage, the soul's Great Good Place.

--Wright Morris

All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.

--Jean-Luc Godard

Acting is all about sincerity-- If you can fake that, you've got it made.

--Mel Brooks

[His] style is detestable; but it is not the worst thing about him.

--Samuel Coleridge on Edward Gibbon

[He] should not be read, but inhaled through a glass pipe.

--Lionel Trilling on Percy Bysshe Shelly

I have just read a long novel [by him]. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

--Wm. Butler Yeats on Henry James

The first man to have cut a swathe through the theater and left it strewn with virgins.

--Frank Harris on George Bernard Shaw

It takes more than genius to keep me reading a book.

--E.B. White on James Joyce

He would not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

--Cyril Connolly on George Orwell

Fifty years old and still only a writer!

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

The greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.

--Norman Mailer on J.D. Salinger

He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the U.S.

--Gore Vidal on Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

--Clive James on Judith Krantz's "Princess Daisy"

His humor is the humor of the mob against the victim, of sword against the pen, of six sleazeballs on a street-corner in Bensonhurst yelling at passing cars. [He] is precisely the kind of ignorant pinheaded loudmouth political pimp Mencken boned and gutted for breakfast.

--Tony Hendra on P.J. O'Rourke

This writing business. Pencils and whatnot. Overrated, if you ask me.

--Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

--Martin Luther King

...I had decided that the only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

--Russell Baker

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

--Robert Frost

I loathe writing. On the other hand I'm a great believer in money.

--S.J. Perelman

Disney, of course, has the best casting. when he doesn't like an actor, he simply tears him up.

--Alfred Hitchcock

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

--Peter Abelard, in Letter 8, Abelard to Heloise

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.

--Robert Frost, Comment

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

--Robert Benchley

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

--Sinclair Lewis

A writer is always admired most, not by those who have read him, but by those who have merely heard of him.

--H.L. Mencken

Little presses write to me for manuscripts and when I write back that I haven't any, they write to ask if they can print the letter saying I haven't any.

--John Steinbeck

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who had ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

--W.H. Auden

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes books

--P.G. Wodehouse

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

--Quentin Crisp

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

--William Gass

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

--E.M. Forster

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it.

--Leo Rosten

Writers are only rarely likable.

--Joan Didion

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

--Anais Nin

A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.

--Edward Albee

The whole world can be divided into those who write and those who do not write.

--Kierkegaard

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

--William Saroyan

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.

--Jules Renard

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

--Jules Renard

You look at TV too long and, boy, after a few hours, you want to go out and shoot yourself in the head.

--Tammy Faye Bakker Messner

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

--Groucho Marx

Schmucks with Underwoods.

--Jack Warner on writers

I think that the fact that I've been pretty successful and don't have too many really terrible shows, and have a reasonable amount of good ones around is that I've always thought that I was as good as the material and no better. And I once wrote for Peter Sellers and I saw how that poor man was preyed upon by film producers who'd say "Ah, don't worry about the script, Peter. You're so funny, you'd be funny without the script." The moment that you start believing that you can be funny in a situation that isn't any good...

--John Cleese, in an interview with Bob Claster

Nothing is less sacrosanct than a mediocre book.

--Helene Hanff

There are two or three people in my experience who were funny no matter what the material was. There was an English vaudeville comic called Tommy Cooper who could just stand there and make me laugh. But I can't do that. I have to have a situation that's funny. I have to have a funny idea that I'm coming from. That's what I believe. And I don't think that I'm any funnier than the material that I've got.

--John Cleese, in an interview with Bob Claster

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

--Toni Morrison

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.

--George Ade

I'm a writer. I've been a writer for so long that writing is my method of thinking. It's my method of organizing myself. I sit down to write in order to find out how I feel about things, you see. Writing is not exactly a craft, for me. That is, a work of the intelligence, a work of cleverness, of taking what you already have and putting it in order. Writing is much more a process of self-discovery.

--Garrison Keillor, in an interview with Bob Claster

The only thing I like doing is writing. But that's terribly hard work, and I only like to do it in short bursts. I think the trouble with most writers is they write too much. I often see things out there on the screen, or even read books and I think, "Why was this written," you know? And then I suddenly realized one day that things were written like that because the guy was a writer. And so he had to write. And he wrote this, and it wasn't very good, but this is how he earns his bread, and so he had to sell it anyway.

--John Cleese, in an interview with Bob Claster

In the afternoons, Gertrude Stein and I used to go antique hunting in the local shops, and I remember once asking her if she thought I should become a writer. In the typically cryptic way we were all so enchanted with, she said, "No." I took that to mean yes and sailed for Italy the next day.

--Woody Allen

It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.

--La Bruyere (1688)

I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.

--Moliere (1659)

I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers.

--Mickey Spillaine

...a lot of stuff, I feel, just shouldn't really be there, because every writer only has so much good material in him in one year. And if he can possibly arrange things for the best possible result, then he should only write that amount of stuff. But most people spread that amount of good material in something that's three times as big or three times as long. So it's much more patchy and spread too thinly. So my great advantage has always been that when I came to do Fawlty Towers, I gave Connie and myself thirty-six weeks to write the six episodes. And we took thirty-six weeks, and we never felt too pressured by time. And in those thirty-six weeks we were able to build a lot of ideas, reasonably original ideas, and fasten them together in a reasonably satisfactory structure.

--John Cleese, in an interview with Bob Claster

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the yard and shot it.

--Truman Capote

The first draft of everything is shit.

--Ernest Hemingway

It's much more important to write than to be written about.

--Gabriel Maria Marquez

How can you write if you can't cry?

--Ring Lardner

Girls bored me--they still do. I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I ever met.

--Walt Disney

I'm for writing that is willing not merely to record but to transform. Writing willing to wrap itself in the chiffon of dream and the goatskin of myth. Writing that can not be intimidated or usurped by ideology. Writing that has the wisdom to admit that much of life is indisputably goofy, and that has the guts to treat that goofiness as seriously as it treats suffering and despair.

I'm for writing that sings in the shower. I'm for writing that shoplifts lingerie at Frederick's of Hollywood. I'm for writing that quivers in your lap like a saucer of jelly and runs up your leg like a mouse. I'm for writing that knocks holes in library walls.

I'm for writing that calls its own number, on a telephone line made from the nose hairs of Buddha. I'm for writing that shall fear no evil, lo though it walk through the valley of the shadow of lit. crit. I'm for salty writing, itchy writing, steelbelted, nickel-plated writing, that attends the white lilacs after the heat is gone. I'm for writing that rescues the princess and the dragon.

I'm for writing that runs with the women who run with the wolves. I'm for writing that glugs out of the deep unconscious like ketchup from a bottle. Writing that can get drunk on ketchup as well on champagne. Drunk writing, intoxicated by beauty and ugliness alike, but is scornful of mediocrity as if it were a hairball coughed up by a poisoned cat.

I'm for writing that resembles alchemy. I'm for writing that has an appetite. I'm for writing that works all year on its Mardi Gras costume, sewing on feathers and bottle caps with a silver thread. Writing that knows the notes that Miles and Dizzy and Thelonius hummed, that combines the motor-boat scat that babies sing with that ongoing chirping requiem that some attribute to the central nervous system and others to the angels.

--Tom Robbins

I took the advice every old writer gives to every young writer: Write about what you know. So I chose random violence.

--Jules Feiffer, explaining the genesis of "Little Murders."

I've never done anything in my life that I didn't want to do, as far as work, for money. So, the work that I do is work that I invent myself. It's not that somebody has a job waiting for me in an office someplace that is the answer to my problems. My work is at a typewriter. It always will be.

--Garrison Keillor, in an interview with Bob Claster

The writer's way is rough and lonely and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say cleaning ferryboats?

--Dorothy Parker

Getting even is one reason for writing.

--William Gass

To me, writing is a horseback ride into heaven and hell and back. I am grateful if I can crawl back alive.

--Thomas Sanchez

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

--Pete Hamill

Fuck the writers.

--Frank Capra

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.

--Franklin P. Adams

Americans like fat books and thin women.

--W.H. Auden

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

--Samuel Johnson

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

--Mark Twain

Hollywood made a movie of my life. The film had me proposing to my wife on a football field. I would never misuse a football field that way.

--Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch

The words `Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,' which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable on the basic appeal of movies.

--Pauline Kael

Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn. Hollywood kept her alive.

--Clare Boothe Luce

In Hollywood, all marriages are happy. It's trying to live together afterward that causes the problems.

--Shelley Winters

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.

--Orson Welles

Who do you have to fuck to get out of show business?

--Shirley Wood, talent coordinator for The Tonight Show in the 1960s

Working in television is like making love to a gorilla. You don't stop when you want to stop; you stop when the gorilla wants to stop.

--David Janssen

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

--H. L. Mencken

Television--a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done.

--Fred Allen

That's the trouble with directors-- always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.

--Sam Goldwyn

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

--Fred Allen

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

--Oscar Levant

There is no denying the fact that writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

--Edna Ferber

An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.

--Adlai E. Stevenson

Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

--P. G. Wodehouse

Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors--no wonder he is crazy.

--H. L. Mencken

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

--Peter De Vries

At least TV evangelists believe the earth is round. Book publishers think if they go past East 93rd Street in NY, they'll fall off.

--Gary Gottesfeld

The advance for a book should be at least as much as the cost of the lunch at which it was discussed.

--Calvin Trillin

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that is too adorable, I'd rather have the money.

--Dorothy Parker

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

--Irvin S. Cobb

The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he's given the freedom to starve anywhere.

--S.J. Perelman

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

--William Faulkner

I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise.

--Noel Coward

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

--Joyce Carol Oates

If you have someone on the set for the hair, why would you not have someone for the words?

--Louis Malle, telling producers why he wanted John Guare around during the filming of "Atlantic City"

June 7. Bad. Wrote nothing today. Tomorrow no time.

--Franz Kafka, Diaries

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.

--Woody Allen

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

--Don Marquis

The agent calls the studio executive and says, "I have the hottest spec script in town in my hands. I'm sending it to you, for your eyes only, overnight read. I mean it, for your eyes only. No one else can see it." The next morning, the agent calls the studio executive and says, "So? What did you think?" The studio executive says, "I don't know. You told me not to show it to anybody."

--Anonymous

I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as the keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse.

--William Faulkner

...write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.

--Ernest Hemingway

You call this a script? Give me a couple of 5,000 dollar a week writers and I'll write it myself!

--Joseph Pasternak

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

--Alan Jay Lerner

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

--Fred Allen

Like a Catholic priest, a writer is unfulfilled. The priest cannot get close enough to godliness in his own eyes. The writer cannot get close enough to writing well.

--Graham Greene

You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.

--Samuel Goldwyn to Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, after hiring a production designer, production manager, and cameraman upon hearing their pitch.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

--Flannery O'Connor

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with one another.

--William Faulkner

Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

--Jessamyn West

There is nothing wrong with Hollywood that three good murders wouldn't fix.

--Ben Hecht

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on a sports jacket and take off my brain.

--Ben Hecht

What's all this business of being a writer? It's just putting one word after another.

--Irving Thalberg

The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the "curiosity" level.

--Rejection slip for "The Diary of Anne Frank"

Burn it, son, burn it. Fire is a great refiner.

--Rejection slip for Harry Crews' manuscript of short stories

It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.

--Rejection slip for "Animal Farm"

This will set publishing back 25 years.

--Rejection slip for "The Deer Park"

These stories have trees in them.

--Rejection slip for "A River Runs Through It"

It is not possible to get hold of an intelligent audience in war time.

--Rejection slip for "Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man"

The film industry's immense technical and financial superstructure rests upon the evanescent basis of an authentic emotion or a moment of beauty, conjured up on sets where everything proclaims contrivance and falsity: an industry built on lies.

--John Updike