Hayden Schlossberg Quotes

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay... does not represent the will of the American people. I'm embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.

I'm only the third artist who's ever drawn at Gitmo.

Everyone is trapped in Guantanamo Bay. The prisoners are trapped of course, but so are the Guards and the staff. Even President Obama who wants to close it down is trapped.

It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters.

At Cheney's initiative, the United States stripped terror suspects of long-established rights under domestic and international law, building a new legal edifice under exclusive White House ownership.

Second, the facility at Guantanamo Bay is necessary to national security.

Now, unfortunately, some prissy card-carrying members of the U.S. Constitution have made us all look bad by pointing out that many of the Gitmo detainees weren't guilty of anything. Whoops!

I think what's going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the U.S.A. I wouldn't say it's the cause of terrorism, but it has given impetus and excuses to potential terrorists to lash out at our country and justify their despicable acts.

Long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp. President Obama fully embraced indefinite detention - the defining injustice of Guantanamo - as his own policy.

Guantanamo Bay is a first-rate detention facility that's kept terrorists off the battlefield and kept America safe. It's critical role in our national security cannot be overstated.

I am a filmmaker. My job is to make films. When something excites you - a story or characterisation - you immediately forget about everything else. You only think how to make a movie out of it. The economics come only later. You shouldn't let money dictate the kind of films you should make.

Guantanamo Bay is a facility that I think should be utilized by the United States for detainees, say, out of Syria.

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nurture and grow that I write my script- it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Mentally, I write myself a little story. Of course, sometimes you have a song that says, "Do that." My best example is Singin' in the Rain. Arthur Freed had insisted that the song should be in the picture, but he was very anxious about it.

There is this old thing that a lot of people say - that the worst experiences make the best films. I don't subscribe to it. But I've seen it happen.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

With Mel [Brooks], only one time and that was later on during "Young Frankenstein" - never with Zero [Mostel] and never with Mel except I was writing every day, and then Mel would come to the house and read what I'd written. And then he'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, OK. But we need a villain or we need whatever it was.

...my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.

When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end.

As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block. When I find myself frozen-whether I'm working on a brief passage in a novel or brainstorming about an entire book-it's usually because I'm trying to shoehorn an idea into the passage or story where it has no place.

Some of the best things that have happened in my stories have happened seemingly of their own accord. The writer becomes a listener, just writing things down as they come.

I was working on other things and I wanted to make a film, and I had some ideas brewing in my head. Brandy's [ Burre] circumstance was such that I didn't really know what was going to happen. That was obviously a surprise, but I knew she was in her mid-to-late thirties and she was starting to really think about her life in a way that really appealed to me, appealed to the women that I know in my life.