One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're g...
Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be the...
Frank Abagnale, Jr.: [whispering to Joanna] Hey... You should fold it. Joanna: What? Frank Abagnale, Jr.: That note. It's a fake, right? You should fold it. Joanna: It's... It's a note from my mom. I have a doctor's appointment. Frank Abagnale, Jr.: ...
Queen Mary: Why will you not confess your crimes against me? Elizabeth: Because, Your Majesty, I have committed none. Queen Mary: You speak with such sincerity. I see you are still a consummate actress. My husband is gone. They have poisoned my child...
Dawson: We joined the Marines because we wanted to live our lives by a certain code, and we found it in the Corps. Now you're asking us to sign a piece of paper that says we have no honor. You're asking us to say we're not Marines. If a court decides...
Percy Wetmore: Well, well, well, looks like you've got yourself a new friend there, Del. Eduard Delacroix: Don't hurt him! Percy Wetmore: [to the guards] That the one I chased? Paul Edgecomb: Yeah, that's the one. Del's been asking for a box' might k...
Elgin Perkins: Hello guys. I'm Mr Perkins, Troy's father. Richard 'Data' Wang: We know who Troy is. He's that cheap guy. Brandon Walsh: My dad's not home, Mr. Perkins. Elgin Perkins: Is your mommy here? Brandon Walsh: [scarcastically] No, actually sh...
Hilly Holbrook: Maybe I can't send you to jail for what you wrote, but I can send you for being a thief. Aibileen Clark: I know something about you. Don't you forget that. From what Yule Mae says, there's a lot of time to write letters in jail. Plent...
Mrs. Chasen: I have here, Harold, the forms sent out by the National Computer Dating Service. It seems to me that as you do not get along with the daughters of my friends, this is the best way for you to find a prospective wife. [Harold starts to int...
Johnny Rocco: You'd give your left arm to nail me wouldn't you? I could see the headlines now, 'Local Deputy Captures Johnny Rocco'. Your picture'd be in all the papers. You might even get to tell on the newsreels how you pulled if off, yeah. Listen ...
Clarissa Saunders: They're not letting what Jeff says get printed in the state. Now if I give you a raft of it over the phone, can you print it up and spread a billion copies? Swell! Get ready to take this down, Mrs. Smith. Ma Smith: Boys, everything...
Eric Cartman: Mom, there's someone at the door. [No reply] Eric Cartman: Mom, I said there's someone at the door! Mrs. Cartman: Coming, hun. Eric Cartman: [as Liane walks past] Ay, I can't see the TV! Mrs. Cartman: Oh, look Eric, It's your little fri...
Jason Bourne: What happened? Marie: Nothing. Jason Bourne: Did something go wrong? Marie: I've got the records. This guy at the front desk was smiling at me, so I thought, all this trouble, maybe it's easier to just ask for them. Jason Bourne: You ha...
Ken: We're not staying here getting pissed. We are quietly sightseeing, like he says, and awaiting his call to see what we do next. Ray: This is my vote on what we should do. We give it another day, two days, max. Then we check the papers again, and ...
Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discove...
Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, "At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been ...
Goodness, that stuff rips like paper,” she exclaimed, reaching to pull her tank top off. She was halfway through the action when the door opened and Alec walked into the room. “Izzy, are you—” he began. His eyes flew wide, and he backed up fa...
This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of ...
By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had bee...
Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge...
Too late for that now,” the Eldest Leprechaun said. “The damage is done. Give the thing a name, and it takes shape. They gave a name and a shape to the force that’s always hated us. It’s everything we’re not. It’s New Ireland, it’s mone...
