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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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William Monahan
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Really
Shitty
World
Hacks
Invariably
Bold
Novelists
Enterprise
Public
Truth
Hack
More quotes by William Monahan
I think that scripts should be published, but they are published, really, because when you're a screenwriter, your stuff ends up in samizdat form on thousands and thousands of desks and shelves across the industry.
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
Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.
William Monahan
I'm more from a double world where I wasn't part of anything or invested in anything, because I was Irish, and very Irish, but also the other part of my family, not that it had airs, or money, was descended from the first minister on Cape Ann in the 1620s.
William Monahan
I was always entirely about work, about getting where I am now. If I'm not working I'm thinking about it, though at some point I learned not to talk about it very much.
William Monahan
When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
William Monahan
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
I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
William Monahan
Actors are players and if they're hot, or onto something, you let them go, or you and the actor can both get on to something. I always run out with lines as I think of them.
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 thing about The Departed, the x-factor that people can't quite put their finger on, is that it deals clearly with class and accent all these things that are fundamental to Boston, but previously anomalous or even prohibited in demotic American films.
William Monahan
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
If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.
William Monahan
You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.
William Monahan
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
You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.
William Monahan
I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.
William Monahan
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
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
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