Leigh Brackett Quotes

#1. Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there's an explosion - that's Plot.

Leigh Brackett

#2. Screenwriting is still a challenge for me. It's more technical than creative. You have to be a very good journeyman plumber and put the proper parts together. Then, if you can still inject a little bit of something worthwhile, you have done as much as can be expected.

Leigh Brackett

#3. The filmmaking process is a team effort. A screenwriter cannot possibly do exactly what he wants as if he was writing a novel.

Leigh Brackett

#4. Writing a film is like building a brick wall. You have a plan, and you have the blocks. Then, somebody says, 'I think we'll take this stone out of here and put it over there. And while we're at it, let's make this stone red and that stone green.'

Leigh Brackett

#5. (I)f you're not honest with yourself, life will never be honest with you.

Leigh Brackett

#6. A hard-boiled little lamb going to talk a lot of lions out of their dinner, Comyn told himself grimly.

Leigh Brackett

#7. Surrender is a perfectly acceptable alternative in extreme circumstances.

Leigh Brackett

#8. When I write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter, and there is nobody in between. But when I write a screenplay, it must be a compromise because there are so many elements which are outside the writer's province.

Leigh Brackett

#9. Len Colter sat in the shade under the wall of the horse barn, eating pone and sweet butter and contemplating a sin.

Leigh Brackett

#10. There's never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn't think he was fully justified. That's a mental trick called rationalizing, and it's done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.

Leigh Brackett

#11. David will never go to space again. I'm glad.What did it gain the McQuarries? What has it ever gained men? Have men ever brought back more happiness from the stars? Will they ever?

Leigh Brackett

#12. Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? And well you should not. For my ally is the Force. And a powerful allyit is.

Leigh Brackett

#13. No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two
hundred buildings to the square mile, shall be built or permitted to exist
anywhere in the United States of America.

Leigh Brackett

#14. Witchcraft to the ignorant, ... Simple science to the learned.

Leigh Brackett

#15. Whether it was the stimulus of the radio, or simply that he was growing up, or both, he saw everything about him in a new way, as though he had managed to get a little distance off so that his sight wasn't blurred by being too close.

Leigh Brackett

#16. You can't destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.

Leigh Brackett