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Quotes on Directing
Quotes on Screenwriting
  and Writing in General
Quotes on Creativity and Inspiration

Quotes on Creativity from Euroscreenwriters

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 on life

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

This means something. This is important.
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain

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

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

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

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 bores 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

Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden.
Karl Kraus

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

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

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

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

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

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