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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

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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
Thinking
Scripts
Across
Industry
Stuff
Ends
Desks
Form
Shelves
Really
Published
Think
Thousands

More quotes by William Monahan

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In reviewing films, people get quite liberal about saying the script this and the script that, when they've never read the script any more than they've read the latest report on Norwegian herring landings.
William Monahan
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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
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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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I don't move until an actor is happy, but it was very important to me as a so-called first time director to keep the machine moving. It was especially important to me to keep it moving and not be some kind of precious writer-director.
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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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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In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
William Monahan
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I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
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Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.
William Monahan
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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
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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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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
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Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan
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You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.
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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The only answer to Are you Beatles or Stones? is, I'm both.
William Monahan
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Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.
William Monahan
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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
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As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.
William Monahan
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If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.
William Monahan