You call this a script?
Give me a couple of
$5,000-a-week writers
and I'll write it myself.
—Movie producer Joe Pasternak
I don't want any yes-men around me.
I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.
—Samuel Goldwyn
Whom God wishes to destroy,
He first makes successful in show business.
—Francis Ford Coppola
You have to have a talent for having talent.
—Ruth Gordon
Don't use your conscious past.
Use your creative imagination
to create a past that belongs
to your characters.
—Stella Adler
Whenever you write, whatever you write,
never make the mistake of assuming the
audience is any less intelligent than you are.
—Rod Serling
The best stories don't
come from good vs. bad
but from good vs. good.
—Leo Tolstoy
If you're going to tell people the truth,
make them laugh, or they'll kill you.
—Billy Wilder
If you can tune into the fantasy life
of an 11-year-old girl, you can
make a fortune in this business.
—George Lucas
"You just gotta save Christianity, Richard! You gotta!"
—Loretta Young to Richard the Lionhearted in The Crusades
"Yer beautiful in yer wrath!
I shall keep you,
and in responding to my passions,
yer hatred will kindle into love."
—John Wayne as Ghengis Kahn, to Susan Hayward, in The Conquerer
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to achieve it by not dying.
—Woody Allen
The faster I write, the better my output.
If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble.
It means I'm pushing the words
instead of being pulled by them.
—Raymond Chandler
The story…must be a conflict,
and specifically a conflict between
the forces of good and evil
within a single person.
—Maxwell Anderson
The best stories don't
come from good vs. bad
but from good vs. good.
—Leo Tolstoy
A dramatic writer should
never tell anything he can show.
—Nunnally Johnson
If all that's going on in your scenes
is what's going on in your scenes,
think about it for a long time.
—William Goldman
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Sixty Years of Great Movie Lines
Copyright © 2023 Hy Bender
Email: hy@hyreviews.com
