Top 135 Quotes & Sayings by William Monahan

In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.

As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

Getting the correct writer is simply like casting. You wouldn't hire an actor in order to tell him how to work. He knows how to work, which is why you hired him.

I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.

When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.

I'm a huge fan of director's cuts or reassemblies if they're good, but I remember being really excited about the restored version of Apocalypse Now, and then I preferred the original film. Kingdom of Heaven as a director's cut is the real picture, but in fact someone recently told me that there was another cut, the original first cut, which he said was just extraordinary. I've never seen it - and of course now I want to, if it exists, and so would everybody else.

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.

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.

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

I don't think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay. He assigns every auctorial move to the director, which makes some sense since the director has run a one-off game, but if Hamlet were written last year and had been only performed once as a film, and it didn't come off well on screen for whatever reason, it would be gone forever as a literary work, and never would have been considered as one.

It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.

If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.

I'm not a precious text protector, or anything like that, you know, because it's a much more vital form than that. You have to rock.

But the web is to some degree a broth of psychopaths seeing what they can get away with in circumstances of anonymity. Look, we live in a world where one is unsafe in various ways because of the Internet. Anything can be said. Someone can look at your house from space.

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.

I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.

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.

I have a library room with four desks in it. On one of them is a spec, on one of them is a present work, on one of them is reading for a future work, on another desk is a novel I'm not doing until I'm a hundred and fifty, and things like that. But, contractually speaking, you just do one at a time when it's on and paid and live. You do your real day on one project and the rest is just literary life. Or intrusions.

I started out as a writer with an hour removed from Kingdom of Heaven. You have to make one print for the entire world, and that's something that influences the theatrical cuts of pictures to an enormous degree. It's a reality. You can't have one cut for the Sunni, and one for the Shia, and one each for Tories, Whigs, vegetarians, one cut for the Cineplex, and one for literary intellectuals.

I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.

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.

Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.

Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.

Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.

I didn't have anything to do with selecting IFC. I don't have anything to do with distribution, or business, or marketing, but think it's a good choice by Graham, and perfect for London Boulevard. It gets the picture straight into a dialog with the public, and it doesn't set the sights too high. They're very hip at IFC, and they get the film. The cineplex hasn't done film any favors as an art form.

I've got things I have to do in fiction to sort of register my existence, before I kick the bucket, but it will never be my living and I know it. Plus it never moved fast enough for me and lacked cut and thrust. I need to be in the real show.

For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.

Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.

It's been very much in the blood since I started imagining films or shooting with 8mm when I was a kid. I made some films and thought about films, but then I went into writing. Becket is something that's definitely on the cards. We have to see where that fits in the schedule, because it's a big picture and I have a lot of writing obligations at the moment. I'm wary of anything with a budget over a certain amount.

Refreshing honesty has been getting me in trouble since I was five, but it's probably had some positive effects - like not being a liar.

There were days when you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald. Video was out, but nobody could afford it...expect for my uncle George, who was a second father to me, and had every film in the world, and every book.

Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will.

I cut London Boulevard pretty aggressively, but I liked the transitions and the elliptical feel that I got. It's not an exceptionally easy film to follow. You have to know that the paparazzo looks like Mark David Chapman. He hasn't got an expositional sign on him.

If you change a location opportunistically, to gain a day on the schedule, which I did more than once, you have to re-rig everything creatively on the spot, and you not only have to be able to do that, but do it with great fluency to keep moving. I used to go apeshit when anything got changed in a film but you live and learn, and I have learned.

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.

Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.

When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.

In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.

By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency.

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.

I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer.

I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.

Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.

I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.

If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.

When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week.

I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.

[Eugene] O'Neill made a living, certainly, at least. But each of these forms have sort of died the death in turn, and it's a simple fact of that universe that talent then migrates away from these forms, and then the amateurs get in, like lunatics in the ruins, sort of pretending to be artists. If you're ambitious enough to want to be a writer to begin with, you want to be a writer in some circumstances where there are rewards, where there's notice, where you don't have to be a teacher, and where you're frankly not nuts for wasting your time.

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.

Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.

A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.

I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.

I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.

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.

That's absolutely true, but one problem with the digital revolution, which may tie into what I said earlier, is that there can be a collapse of quality. You may not have liked the decisions made by publishers in the past, you may not have liked the decisions made by magazine editors or newspaper editors in the past. At least there was some quality control

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.

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.

The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.