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" Cinema is a visual language, and you're always looking for visual metaphors for things. You know, if I was writing a play about Howard Hughes, I could have him give a monologue about how he's terrified to touch a doorknob. But on screen, you know, working with Marty Scorsese in 'The Aviator,' that became the series of images that told a story. "

John Logan

Know

Language

" Working on 'Skyfall' was the most enjoyable experience I've ever had on a movie, ever. "

" I grew up loving monsters. I'm just a total monster geek. When I was a kid, I had the Aurora monster models, and I would make them. I loved the Universal horror movies and the Hammer movies. I just had an affinity for them. "

" I grew up on the Bond movies. The first one I saw was 'Diamonds Are Forever,' when I was a kid. I just loved them to pieces. "

" Everything about 'Hugo' to me is poignant, from the broken orphan to the old man losing his past to the fragility of film itself. "

" Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was. "

" The reason that I'm a writer today is because of Shakespeare and falling in love with Shakespeare when I was 8. That was through the movies, actually - through Olivier's 'Hamlet.' That was the first thing that got me to fall in love with Shakespeare and movies and everything in one big preadolescent rush. "

" The themes, ideas and the characters from 'Skyfall' can obviously continue on, because it is a franchise, and it is an ongoing story. "

" Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies - 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I'm working on the new Bond, I'm constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies - what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances? "

" Working with Ridley is working with one of the great filmmakers and one of the great raconteurs. You know, it's like, a dinner with Ridley Scott or a dinner with Martin Scorsese? You just want to cut your arm off to get those. "

" I couldn't write a happy movie or romantic comedy to save my life. Yes, Noel Coward's an idol, but his plays are serious to me. 'Private Lives' and 'Design for Living' both have an edge. Without psychoanalyzing myself, I think I exorcise my demons in my work. "

" Young screenwriters are always very frustrated when they talk to me. They say, 'How do we get to be a screenwriter?' I say, 'You know what you do? I'll tell you the secret, it's easy: Read 'Hamlet.' You know? Then read it again, and read it again, and read it until you understand it. Read 'King Lear,' and then read 'Othello.' "

John Logan

Say

Easy

" The history of screenwriting - of what we do - is more than 100 years old. It's thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only - the only - separation for being a dramatist is reading drama. "

" If you look at the muscularity of something like 'Wicked' and the way it has just spawned sort of generations of young people wanting to get involved in the theatre - it's brilliant. "

" I'm a very private person, a very bookish person. The social world of Hollywood I know nothing about because I choose not to take part. "

" Realistically, it's the great truism that screenwriters are fungible, that at the end of the day a studio is not going to want to fire a movie star. And they're really not going to want to fire a star director because the director has the hand on the tiller of a ship. "

" Theater people say you are either a comedian or a tragedian, and I'm a tragedian. And the vexing, dark characters, the ones where I don't understand their pain or their anguish, they are the characters that appeal to me. "

" By the time I wrote 'Any Given Sunday' or 'Bats,' I sort of knew what my job was in terms of what a writer of dialogue does. "

" Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point. "

" We wanted 'Hugo' to be a cornucopia of cinema, a celebration of everything we do in movies. "

" I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level. "

" Any adaptation - and I've done three in my career. I did 'Sweeney Todd' and 'Hugo' and 'Coriolanus.' It's important to find what makes it a movie as opposed to just a film presentation of a stage play. "

" I fell in love with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone and Hitchcock and Orson Welles and John Huston. "

" I'm not interested in characters who aren't broken. I'm not interested in happy people. It just doesn't draw me as a writer. "

" I love novels, but I'm not a novelist. I'm just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That's all I have ever wanted to do. "