You are your own scriptwriter and the play is never finished, no matter what your age or position in life.
If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.
No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.
A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.
A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.
Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)
I've had fans come and knock on my door. I'm usually polite, but I'm usually very direct and say, 'It's not cool that you come here uninvited.
Directing comes closer than anything I’ve found yet to providing me with a good reason to get up in the morning that goes beyond just getting some money. Because all the money does is buy the bed. Getting out of it is the problem.
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.