William Monahan
The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read.Collection: Reading
Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.Collection: Trying
When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.Collection: Writing
I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.Collection: Directors
Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.Collection: Stars
Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.Collection: People
I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.Collection: Ocean
Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.Collection: Film
Out of all of the Star Trek movies, I happen to like the most recent one the best. I think it was the best one ever done.Collection: Stars
I don't think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay. He assigns every auctorial move to the director, which makes some sense since the director has run a one-off game, but if Hamlet were written last year and had been only performed once as a film, and it didn't come off well on screen for whatever reason, it would be gone forever as a literary work, and never would have been considered as one.Collection: Running
I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.Collection: Serious
Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.Collection: Availability
I never write with particular actors in mind.Collection: Writing
When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever.Collection: Kids
Actors are players and if they're hot, or onto something, you let them go, or you and the actor can both get on to something. I always run out with lines as I think of them.Collection: Running
Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on.Collection: Running
If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.Collection: Gears
I went into directing having observed and learned from the best. There was a certain standard of procedure. I found that I was equal to it. I thoroughly enjoyed directing, I liked it a lot. It's very satisfactory to see that you can do it. The art takes care of itself.Collection: Art
I don't have an aversion to quote unquote remakes, because I understand what dramatic writing is, what the dramatic profession has always been about, which is talent, not the pretext for its exhibition.Collection: Writing
There's always a great hue and cry when you sign onto a "remake," and that's always been sort of annoying me and freaking me out. This profession that we're in is drama. What drama has been since the beginning is, you restage plays with new casts, or a writer will take a new run at an old story.Collection: Running
I have a library room with four desks in it. On one of them is a spec, on one of them is a present work, on one of them is reading for a future work, on another desk is a novel I'm not doing until I'm a hundred and fifty, and things like that. But, contractually speaking, you just do one at a time when it's on and paid and live. You do your real day on one project and the rest is just literary life. Or intrusions.Collection: Real
As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.Collection: Moving
Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.Collection: Writing
I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.Collection: Stars
The only answer to "Are you Beatles or Stones?" is, "I'm both."Collection: Answers
The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.Collection: Ideas
You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.Collection: Thinking
I was always entirely about work, about getting where I am now. If I'm not working I'm thinking about it, though at some point I learned not to talk about it very much.Collection: Thinking
I love audiences, but they're not there to drive the bus. Whenever you ask opinions or anticipate opinions you can get pretty terrible art, or non-art. You need a single guiding intelligence, even in a collaborative form.Collection: Art
I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.Collection: Thinking
You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.Collection: Writing
Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.Collection: Writing
If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.Collection: Hats
For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.Collection: Actors
The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.Collection: Wake Up
Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.Collection: Mind
A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.Collection: Scripts
Getting the correct writer is simply like casting. You wouldn't hire an actor in order to tell him how to work. He knows how to work, which is why you hired him.Collection: Order
If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.Collection: Jobs
Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will.Collection: Want
You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.Collection: People
You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.Collection: Lying
I think that gambling is a synthetic experience and that if you have any balls you gamble with your life. I have. So can everybody else.Collection: Thinking
If TV seems improved, I think it's been enhanced by violence and sex permissible on cable, as well as better cinematography, but in the end it's really only soap operas like your grandmother's afternoon "stories" and that's all it wants to be or has to be.Collection: Sex
I'm usually the first guy to propose a change because I'm continuing my process. We're in a context, in this business, a context in which most screenplays work on a very modest level of achievement, in that a lot of them aren't really written by what you would call writers.Collection: Achievement
Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.Collection: Art
The novel may be dead as a commercial form. When art forms things die as commercial forms, something happens to the practice of those arts that isn't very pleasant. It used to be that a poet like Tennyson could keep his house and his coach-and-four and his staff of six servants on the income from poetry. That doesn't happen anymore.Collection: Art
Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.Collection: Guy
[Eugene] O'Neill made a living, certainly, at least. But each of these forms have sort of died the death in turn, and it's a simple fact of that universe that talent then migrates away from these forms, and then the amateurs get in, like lunatics in the ruins, sort of pretending to be artists. If you're ambitious enough to want to be a writer to begin with, you want to be a writer in some circumstances where there are rewards, where there's notice, where you don't have to be a teacher, and where you're frankly not nuts for wasting your time.Collection: Teacher
But the web is to some degree a broth of psychopaths seeing what they can get away with in circumstances of anonymity. Look, we live in a world where one is unsafe in various ways because of the Internet. Anything can be said. Someone can look at your house from space.Collection: Space