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Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.

William Monahan

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William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Reveal
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Dialogue
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More quotes by William Monahan

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I think the only real referent for anybody writing drama is probably Hamlet. You have the most extreme tragic drama, this sort of blood-boltered thing, but it's also very funny, which is simply a matter of the playwright being alive and observant and entertaining, and understanding not only the world but what will play.
William Monahan
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In reviewing films, people get quite liberal about saying the script this and the script that, when they've never read the script any more than they've read the latest report on Norwegian herring landings.
William Monahan
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Casting is always subject to availabilities.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.
William Monahan
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I never write with particular actors in mind.
William Monahan
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You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.
William Monahan
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I'm not a precious text protector, or anything like that, you know, because it's a much more vital form than that. You have to rock.
William Monahan
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When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.
William Monahan
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I'm more from a double world where I wasn't part of anything or invested in anything, because I was Irish, and very Irish, but also the other part of my family, not that it had airs, or money, was descended from the first minister on Cape Ann in the 1620s.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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There were days when you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald. Video was out, but nobody could afford it...expect for my uncle George, who was a second father to me, and had every film in the world, and every book.
William Monahan
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I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.
William Monahan
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Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.
William Monahan
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For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.
William Monahan
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I shoot very little film. If you just do coverage you're shooting any number of potential films instead of just one, and I was shooting just one specific film. Film is cheap but time is expensive.
William Monahan
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If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.
William Monahan
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Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan