Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" It would be far less interesting, after 'The Empire Strikes Back,' to have an hour-long movie in between 'Empire' and 'Return of the Jedi,' where Luke is training. It's so much cooler to cut from end of 'Empire' to beginning of 'Return,' where he's become the Jedi. "

Related Quotes:

" It's always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don't have a good ending, it's the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of 'The Kite Runner,' and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes. "

David Benioff

World

Ending

Book

" But in a 24-hour day, the 25th hour is also the impossible hour, an hour that doesn't exist, that can only be created by the imagination. "

" I can't measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world's most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born. "

" Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages. "

" I don't like extremely long movies. I tend to get a bit impatient. There are definitely exceptions, like 'Lawrence of Arabia,' but for the most part, I feel that movies should usually be shorter and not longer. "

" Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying. "

" With the movies, people are not going to wait around. The deadline is a deadline. In publishing it's more a polite suggestion. "

David Benioff

Deadline

Wait

" I was a huge fantasy geek growing up. I was the dungeon master in my D&D game. "

David Benioff

Growing

Fantasy

" If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true. "

" We always talk about how the first several seasons were faithful to the books, and anybody who wanted to could go onto Wikipedia and learn Ned Stark gets beheaded or about The Red Wedding, and most people don't want to know - because why ruin a story? "

" With screenplays, it's all about being as concise as possible. If you have a scene that's set in a bar, you just have to write, 'Interior: Bar.' "

" It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success. "

" My favorite food in the world is hard shell crabs from Maryland. "

" If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff. "

" I like having my own story remain my story. "

David Benioff

Story

Having

" Just the notion of falling for someone, that involves weakness. "

" I think, in a weird way, the reason I was drawn to screenwriting and the reason I really love doing it is because I love writing dialogue. "

" 'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script. "

" Some of my happiest childhood memories are going to the movies with my dad and seeing whatever was out that week. In 1977, when I was 7, it was 'Star Wars.' That was a life-changer. "

" I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover. "

" Sometimes I get jealous when I'm reading a great book by a younger writer. But 'White Tiger' is so good, I almost forgot to hate Aravind Adiga. "

" And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal - to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn't have the novels, maybe I'd be much more frustrated by not having directed yet. "

David Benioff

Think

Grow Up

" I'm just not a natural teacher. "

" Movies that are subtitled don't usually do as well in American theatres. "

" For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes? "

" I don't type my sentences on an arena's pitch, surrounded by thousands of cheering or booing fans - I don't feel pressure to please a crowd. "

" We have amazing stunt performers and in Miguel Sapochnik, a director who's so good at spending hours and hours and hours on every shot beforehand, so that he knows exactly what he wants when he gets to the battlefield on the day. We only shoot ten-hour days, so you have to pack a lot into those ten hours. "

" McCullers is one of those rare writers who remembers what childhood is like. Not incidents, which anyone can recall, but states of mind, which are so difficult to recreate. "

David Benioff

Difficult

Rare

" Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts. "

" Fiction novels, that's my game. "