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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
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More quotes by William Monahan
I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
William Monahan
I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
William Monahan
Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
William Monahan
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
If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan
I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.
William Monahan
I don't watch anything. I work so much. If I see a film, it's usually that I'll go in after working 15 hours and slam in The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.
William Monahan
If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.
William Monahan
I wanted to do London Boulevard because I saw the potential of a story about two people who need each other desperately, who love at first sight, as one does, and above all a story in which no one is what they appear to be.
William Monahan
I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.
William Monahan
