William Monahan Quotes - Page 3

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• 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

  Dying, Stuff, Way

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Monahan

  Boston, Class, People

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  William Monahan

  Art, World, England

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Monahan

  Air, Capes, World

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• In Boston terms I was everyone and no one, with no social investment, no social insecurity, sort of Imitation of Christ in one hand and The Education of Henry Adams in the other, and because I was part of nothing I could observe everything without having anything personal invested in the findings.

  William Monahan

  Boston, Hands, Insecurity

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Beach, Swim, Towels

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Scotland, Intellectual, Massachusetts

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I was just standing in the street, a bit dazzled by an Antonioni bus wipe, which by the way are inherent in London, and I imagined a film set in London starting out with the riff from The Yardbird's "Heart Full of Soul", and now, how ever many years later, I've done it.

  William Monahan

  Heart, Years, Soul

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, "It's very visual, isn't it," and realized it was the key to my whole life since then.

  William Monahan

  Keys, Manhattan, Breakfast

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Gratitude, Kids, Important

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.

  William Monahan

  Thinking, People, Needs

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.

  William Monahan

  Writing, Thinking, Long

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• You never know what people are going to go and see.

  William Monahan

  People, Knows

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Monahan

  Art, Hero, Mean

  "Exclusive: William Monahan Candidly Discusses THE GAMBLER, His Severe Bike Accident Earlier This Year, His Approach to Writing, MOJAVE, VENGEANCE, John Le Carre’s A DELICATE TRUTH, Television, and More". Interview with Steve "Frosty" Weintraub, collider.com. December 12, 2014.

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• I'm usually the first guy to propose a change because I'm continuing my process. We're in a context, in this business, a context in which most screenplays work on a very modest level of achievement, in that a lot of them aren't really written by what you would call writers.

  William Monahan

  Achievement, Guy, Levels

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• They're done by guys who have talked a good game and then have scrambled together the simulacrum of a drama, so actors are habituated to sometimes having to save a picture on the floor because it's usually part of their job, but they'd rather have a writer doing his job, so that they can do theirs. But I like nothing better than working with actors.

  William Monahan

  Jobs, Drama, Games

  Source: collider.com

  7 Copy quote

• A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical.

  William Monahan

  Character, Interesting, Criminals

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Criminals, Bags

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Rights, Giving, Advice

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Association, Motion Pictures, Cases

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.

  William Monahan

  Guy, Ordinary, Six

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

  William Monahan

  Art, Writing, Class

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• [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.

  William Monahan

  Teacher, Artist, Simple

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Monahan

  Novelists, Cracks, Able

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Monahan

  Real, Cutting, Buckets

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

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