Martin Sheen Quotes

As you know, in America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio, so if they want to remake it they can.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

When you do a first movie, you're contractually supposed to do the second one and then you don't do it, you become an executive producer. That's why there are a ton of directors who have executive producer credits on other movies.

Authors of books are not given very much control over the films that are made from their books.

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written.

Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position.

In America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, slipshod allusions. It is not to take the first word that offers, but the best word in common use; it is not to throw words together in any combinations we please, but to follow and avail ourselves of the true idiom of the language.

There were offers from a few Bollywood filmmakers, but I was sceptical as to whether those films will do justice to my vision or even my life. I was also apprehensive because what if I sign an agreement and give the rights to some filmmaker, and he shelves the project?

Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?

I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.

If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language.

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

Writing is tyranny ... but reading is democracy.

So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.