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If I can give a young author any advice, whatsoever, never let anyone announce the film sale of your first novel. Film rights are sold to almost every novel, but it shouldn't be the lead story in your first engagement with the press. Then you end up getting reviews like a novel made for the screen and things like that.

William Monahan

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William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
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Claude La Badarian
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More quotes by William Monahan

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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
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On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
William Monahan
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I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.
William Monahan
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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
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I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
William Monahan
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I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
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When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
William Monahan
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You never know what people are going to go and see.
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've got things I have to do in fiction to sort of register my existence, before I kick the bucket, but it will never be my living and I know it. Plus it never moved fast enough for me and lacked cut and thrust. I need to be in the real show.
William Monahan
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In Boston terms I was everyone and no one, with no social investment, no social insecurity, sort of Imitation of Christ in one hand and The Education of Henry Adams in the other, and because I was part of nothing I could observe everything without having anything personal invested in the findings.
William Monahan
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Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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Whatever you cut when there's no deadline isn't really a cut. You're just pushing colors around.
William Monahan
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I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
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Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
William Monahan
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In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
William Monahan
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It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
William Monahan
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I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.
William Monahan
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If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.
William Monahan