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London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.
William Monahan
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William Monahan
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Tudors
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London
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Matter
Tudor
More quotes by William Monahan
All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, It's very visual, isn't it, and realized it was the key to my whole life since then.
William Monahan
Whatever you cut when there's no deadline isn't really a cut. You're just pushing colors around.
William Monahan
The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.
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
Refreshing honesty has been getting me in trouble since I was five, but it's probably had some positive effects - like not being a liar.
William Monahan
Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan
I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.
William Monahan
I cut London Boulevard pretty aggressively, but I liked the transitions and the elliptical feel that I got. It's not an exceptionally easy film to follow. You have to know that the paparazzo looks like Mark David Chapman. He hasn't got an expositional sign on him.
William Monahan
My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.
William Monahan
In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.
William Monahan
I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
William Monahan
I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.
William Monahan
I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.
William Monahan
Doing crime films...maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.
William Monahan
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
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.
William Monahan
If you change a location opportunistically, to gain a day on the schedule, which I did more than once, you have to re-rig everything creatively on the spot, and you not only have to be able to do that, but do it with great fluency to keep moving. I used to go apeshit when anything got changed in a film but you live and learn, and I have learned.
William Monahan