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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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William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Learned
Channel
Open
Swim
Going
Beach
Britain
Scared
Towel
Moved
Eliot
Walk
Towels
Walks
Threw
More quotes by 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 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
There's only one way to prep, so far as I know. You have your script, you hire the people you want, you find your locations and your setups, everybody shows up and you shoot the film.
William Monahan
I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
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
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
I shoot very little film. If you just do coverage you're shooting any number of potential films instead of just one, and I was shooting just one specific film. Film is cheap but time is expensive.
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
Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan
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
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
It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
William Monahan
I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.
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
For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.
William Monahan
My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.
William Monahan
If I can give a young author any advice, whatsoever, never let anyone announce the film sale of your first novel. Film rights are sold to almost every novel, but it shouldn't be the lead story in your first engagement with the press. Then you end up getting reviews like a novel made for the screen and things like that.
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
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
