William Goldman
William Goldman
William Goldmanis an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He came to prominence in the 1950s as a novelist, before turning to writing for film. He has won two Academy Awards for his screenplays, first for the western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidand again for All the President's Men, about journalists who broke the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon. Both films starred Robert Redford...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth12 August 1931
CityHighland Park, IL
CountryUnited States of America
The easiest thing to do on earth is not write…But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.
I write out of revenge.
A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite
You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.
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, that Demon being 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.
One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it.
Studio executives are intelligent, brutally overworked men and women who share one thing in common with baseball managers: they wake up every morning of the world with the knowledge that sooner or later they're going to get fired.
Anyway, here's the "good parts" version. S. Morgenstern wrote it. And my father read it to me. And now I give it to you. What you do with it will be of more than passing interest to us all.
What are we going to do about Billy? That was the phrase that haunted me those first ten years. I pretended not to care, but secretly I was petrified. Everyone and everything was passing me by. I had no real friends, no single person who shared an equal interest in all games. I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed, I might have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone.
As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless - and absolutely essential.
Sonny, true love is the greatest thing, in the world -- except for a nice MLT -- mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is lean and the tomato is ripe.
I have always liked it, it is still my favorite book. 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.
I just don't want to get there and find out it stinks.
Fact: "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" is, no question, the most popular thing I've ever been connected with. When I die, if the Times gives me an obit, it's going to be because of Butch.