Top 68 David Benioff Quotes
#1. 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.
David Benioff
#2. This is good, life must continue, we are fighting barbarians, but we must remain human.
David Benioff
#3. It smelled like jail ... sore knees and loose assholes.
David Benioff
#4. Movies that are subtitled don't usually do as well in American theatres.
David Benioff
#5. So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We honor the dead and abhor the dying.
- from the story De Composition
David Benioff
#7. The man knows he's a target. He's very careful. The'll find the guns.'
Kolya responded with a mournful fart, low and solemn as a single note of a baritone horn.
David Benioff
#8. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.
David Benioff
#9. Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.
David Benioff
#10. Markov's not important,' she said. 'I'm not important. You're not important. Winning the war, that's the only important thing.'
'No,' I said, 'I disagree. Markov was important. So am I and so are you. That's why we have to win.
David Benioff
#11. I was half asleep but I smiled. In spite of all his irritating qualities, I couldn't help liking a man who despised a fictional character with such passion.
David Benioff
#12. I was a huge fantasy geek growing up. I was the dungeon master in my D&D game.
David Benioff
#13. '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.
David Benioff
#14. He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn't share them all at once.
David Benioff
#15. The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening.
David Benioff
#16. If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.
David Benioff
#17. Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.
David Benioff
#19. You don't like the girl. You don't know what color eyes she has, you don't like her.
David Benioff
#20. The secret to winning a woman is calculated neglect.
David Benioff
#21. Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn't register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you're too daft to know you're mortal?
David Benioff
#22. Don't worry, my friend. I won't let you die.
I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.
David Benioff
#23. 'Game Of Thrones' was too big a canvas for a movie, but 'Dirty White Boys' is like a great old Western: there's so much compression, and it's so pressurized, it demands to be told in one sitting.
David Benioff
#25. If this is a dream the whole world is inside it.
David Benioff
#26. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen.
David Benioff
#27. That's our plan? We're going to walk fifty kilometers, right past the Germans, to a poultry collective that maybe didn't get burned down, grab a dozen eggs, and come home?"
"Well, anything would sound ridiculous if said it in that tone of voice."
"Tone of ... I'm asking you a question!
David Benioff
#28. 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.
David Benioff
#29. 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.
David Benioff
#30. 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.
David Benioff
#31. A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.
David Benioff
#32. To shoot a decent fight, you need to cover all the different angles, and it ends up eating a lot of days.
David Benioff
#33. The lonliest sound in the world is other people making love.
David Benioff
#34. Hollywood screenwriters tend to have the longevity of NFL running backs. So the truth is no one can put more pressure on us than we put on ourselves.
David Benioff
#35. 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.
David Benioff
#36. I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.
David Benioff
#37. Those words you want to say right now? Don't say them.' He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. 'And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life'.
David Benioff
#38. Contrary to popular belief, the experience of terror does not make you braver. Perhaps though, it is easier to hide your fear when you're afraid all the time.
David Benioff
#39. If we piled them up, they would reach God.' 'But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.' 'Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.' " "Old one." "Jokes only get old if they're good. Otherwise, who keeps telling them?" "People like you who aren't funny?
David Benioff
#40. 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
#41. -What's the good news?
-Pardon?
-You said the bad news is we're going the wrong way.
-There isn't any good news. Just because there's bad news doesn't mean there's good news, too.
David Benioff
#42. 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.
David Benioff
#43. Everyone knew this was the episode that was going to make or break the season.
David Benioff
#44. Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny.
David Benioff
#45. 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.'
David Benioff
#46. I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.
David Benioff
#47. Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.
David Benioff
#49. The fire was silent, the little houses collapsing into the flames without complaint, flocks of sparks rising to the sky. At a distance it seemed beautiful, and I thought it was strange that powerful violence is often so pleasing to the eye ...
David Benioff
#51. 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.
David Benioff
#52. There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.
David Benioff
#53. I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.
David Benioff
#54. 'The 25th Hour' came out of the decision - a really very conscious decision - that I needed a story set within a compressed time frame because that would help focus the story.
David Benioff
#55. Fear is part of our inheritance.
Lev from City of Thieves
David Benioff
#56. The eternal challenge for screenwriter adapters is figuring out how to make something work on screen, when so much of what made it work in the book were the thoughts of the character, and obviously wanting to avoid voiceover.
David Benioff
#57. They have decided nothing can kill them but God himself, and they don't even believe in him.
David Benioff; City of Thieves
David Benioff
#58. There's never been a fantasy movie of the epic battle of good versus evil that ended with evil winning.
David Benioff
#59. Every time something bad happens, like we lose a day because of weather or an actor gets injured or anything else happens, the schedule has to change. It's the most challenging Tetris puzzle.
David Benioff
#61. The longer you work in this business [movie], the more you start to be able to see the carpentry. You can see where things are going, and it's harder to surprise you, as a reader
David Benioff
#62. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss
David Benioff
#63. 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
#64. 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.
David Benioff
#65. She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.
David Benioff
#66. Your mother's cunt has a peculiar tubular shape!' he yelled. 'Nonetheless, I tolerate its effluvium and enthusiastically lick its inner folds whenever she demands!
David Benioff
#68. 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.
David Benioff
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