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Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.
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
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Aliens
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More quotes by 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
I wanted to do London Boulevard because I saw the potential of a story about two people who need each other desperately, who love at first sight, as one does, and above all a story in which no one is what they appear to be.
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
I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.
William Monahan
You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.
William Monahan
Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.
William Monahan
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
In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
William Monahan
I learned from Ridley [Scott] how to come out of the trailer at a fast walk and make your decisions and keep it going. We were very much on time and under budget, as they say. That was a very important thing for me and very satisfactory.
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
Get Carter is a classic, but it did nothing in the United States. It came out on a double bill with a Frank Sinatra western.
William Monahan
Out of all of the Star Trek movies, I happen to like the most recent one the best. I think it was the best one ever done.
William Monahan
The only answer to Are you Beatles or Stones? is, I'm both.
William Monahan
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
I can work in London. A British journalist asked me if I had any trouble working with an English crew, as an American, and I said I might have if I was from Scotland, but I'm from Massachusetts, which is sort of Oxfordshire, but more intellectual. That's kind of unforgivable but you've got to let them have it.
William Monahan
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
The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read.
William Monahan
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
If TV seems improved, I think it's been enhanced by violence and sex permissible on cable, as well as better cinematography, but in the end it's really only soap operas like your grandmother's afternoon stories and that's all it wants to be or has to be.
William Monahan
If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.
William Monahan
