Literary Birthday – 12 August – William Goldman

William Goldman was born 12 August 1931 and died 16 November 2018.

William Goldman Quotes

1. One of the easiest things in the world is not to write… If it were easy, everyone would do it.
2. Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you—the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
3. The enemy is always in the mind.
4. It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy, even the normal ones are weird.
5. Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.
6. Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life.
7. Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting.
8. When I was your age, television was called books.
9. God grant you your quota of smiles.
10. Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!
11. You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.
12. I do not like my writing, but I like this book… I wish I liked my own writing more, but like all of us, I am trapped inside my own skin.
13. Her heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high.
14. But love is many things, none of them logical.
15. I don’t guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.
16. I write out of revenge.

William Goldman was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. His books include Marathon Man, and The Princess Bride, both of which Goldman adapted for film. He won two Academy Awards for the screenplays, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid  and All the President’s Men.

Read William Goldman’s 10 Commandments On Writing

Source for quotes

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Goldman,_author,_screenwriter.jpg

Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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