Hal Hartley, in Amateur

In even the smallest things she saw the pointlessness of hope.

Graffito seen in College Street bathroom

This is a trick mirror. You are beautiful.

Tony Kushner on screenwriting (from a commencement address)

And as long as I have slipped and am offering advice, here's some more: Don't smoke, are you crazy? Don't take drugs, aren'’t there enough chemicals in your shampoo and your apples and your air and your antihistimene, don'’t drink it makes you sloppy, don'’t drive an SUV are you crazy, don'’t make deals with the devil don'’t even do lunch with the devil donÂ't even take his phone calls; he wants you to write a screenplay for him and he wants to give you NOTES.

Kierkegaard, in Either/Or

Most people complain that the world is so prosaic, that life is not like romance, where opportunities are always so favorable. I complain that life is not like romance, where one has hard-hearted parents and nixies and trolls to fight, and enchanted princesses to free. What are all such enemies taken together, compared with the pale, bloodless, tenacious, nocturnal shapes with which I fight, and to whom I give life and substance?

Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex

Seated at her desk, turning over vague stories in her mind, woman enjoys the easy pretense that she is a writer; but she must come to the actual putting of black marks on white paper, she must give them meaning in the eyes of others. Then the cheating is exposed.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower …

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable or either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us.

Various

Pain is weakness leaving the body.
U.S. Marines

Better is the enemy of good.
Clark Henderson, Miramax

Saul Bellow, Herzog

Herzog wrote, Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

A Chinese proverb

You can't prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from nesting in your hair.

Philip Roth, in Zuckerman Bound

Pain is in addition to everything else. There are hysterics, of course, who can mime any disease, but they constitute a far more exotic species of chameleon than the psychosomologists lead all you gullible sufferers to believe. You are no such reptile. Case dismissed.

Gary Ross on screenwriters

People put an expectation on themselves at the start of the outlining process that the story should be fully formed the minute they think of the premise. But you wouldn'’t get mad at yourself for being on page 10 when you begin writing the screenplay instead of page a hundred. That'’s because the progress at ththe screenwritingng stage is linear. But because the progress in an outline is nonlinear, people get frustrated with themselves for not being done when they'vve only just started. Then they utter the most dangerous line in all filmmakinging: I'll figure it out when I write."

Andre Malraux

What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

Robert Frost, "The Pauper Witch of Grafton"

Up where the trees grow short, the mosses tall,
I made him gather me wet snow berries
On slippery rocks beside a waterfall.
I made him do it for me in the dark.
And he liked everything I made him do.
I hope if he is where he sees me now
He's so far off he can't see what I've come to.
You can come down from everything to nothing.
All is, if I'd a-known when I was young
And full of it, that this would be the end,
It doesn't seem as if I'd had the courage
To make so free and kick up in folks' faces.
I might have, but it doesn't seem as if.

Goethe, Elective Affinities

And so they all, each in his own way, reflectingly or unreflectingly, go on with their daily lives; everything seems to take its accustomed course, for indeed, even in desperate situations where everything hangs in the balance, one goes on living as though nothing were wrong.

Alice Munro, "The Spanish Lady"

Why is it a surprise that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

William Blake

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathesome.

Paul Desmond

Of fashion models, he said, "Sometimes they go around with guys who are scuffling -- for a while. But usually they end up marrying some cat with a factory. This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker."