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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

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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
People
Write
Producer
Stuff
Producers
Didn
Scripts
Different
Honestly
Writing
Realize
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More quotes by William Monahan

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I hate doing anything in offices. I either want to be out in the world or in my own environment - and it should be your own environment that you work in.
William Monahan
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Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.
William Monahan
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I'm usually the first guy to propose a change because I'm continuing my process. We're in a context, in this business, a context in which most screenplays work on a very modest level of achievement, in that a lot of them aren't really written by what you would call writers.
William Monahan
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I never write with particular actors in mind.
William Monahan
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For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.
William Monahan
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T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne Walk. I'm not going to do that but I'm not scared of the open channel between me and Britain.
William Monahan
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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
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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'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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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
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There's always a great hue and cry when you sign onto a remake, and that's always been sort of annoying me and freaking me out. This profession that we're in is drama. What drama has been since the beginning is, you restage plays with new casts, or a writer will take a new run at an old story.
William Monahan
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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
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It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
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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If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.
William Monahan
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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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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
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Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
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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I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan