Quote

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.

William Monahan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Wells
Well
Kind
Think
Thinking
Sensed
Leads
General

More quotes by William Monahan

Image
When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week.
William Monahan
Image
I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer.
William Monahan
Image
On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
William Monahan
Image
I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
Image
When they see you get what you want and move on, quickly, you've done a contract with the crew from that point. In Britain if the sparks call you Guv on day two, you never need an award of any other kind.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.
William Monahan
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As first time director, though, you're like a new officer coming up to be in charge of very serious veterans, and you're always going to have guys looking at each other for the first day until they realize you're not screwing around.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty million dollar film, and prep two movies, and there is no way to overstate that when you've worked with Ridley, it's like having been a quarterdeck lieutenant to Lord Nelson.
William Monahan
Image
If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.
William Monahan
Image
I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.
William Monahan