David Benioff

“‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.”

“If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.”

“Movies that are subtitled don't usually do as well in American theatres.”

“For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?”

“Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.”

“I'm just not a natural teacher.”

“My favorite food in the world is hard shell crabs from Maryland.”

“With screenplays, it's all about being as concise as possible. If you have a scene that's set in a bar, you just have to write, 'Interior: Bar.'”

“I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover.”

“Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.”

“A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.”

“It's crazy enough to be the person crawling through the bushes in Northern Ireland with a telescopic lens taking pictures - there are crazy people out there. But the idea that people want to go to sites and find out those spoilers... it's like if there was a website called Last Pages of Great Books, would you read that?”

“The front door is usually unlocked and there is no alarm system. They don't wear their seat belts in the car; they don't wear suntan lotion in the sun. They have decided nothing can kill them but God himself, and they don't even believe in him.”

“'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.”

“But in a 24-hour day, the 25th hour is also the impossible hour, an hour that doesn't exist, that can only be created by the imagination.”

“I think, in a weird way, the reason I was drawn to screenwriting and the reason I really love doing it is because I love writing dialogue.”

“It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success.”

“It would be far less interesting, after 'The Empire Strikes Back,' to have an hour-long movie in between 'Empire' and 'Return of the Jedi,' where Luke is training. It's so much cooler to cut from end of 'Empire' to beginning of 'Return,' where he's become the Jedi.”

“McCullers is one of those rare writers who remembers what childhood is like. Not incidents, which anyone can recall, but states of mind, which are so difficult to recreate.”

“She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.”